In the past, if you wanted to call through or email a bunch of businesses rapidly, you would have to make use of a big book like the Yellow Pages and other repositories to target your customers. With the advent of high-tech social media sites and improved data collection methods, the requirement to use the Yellow Pages and other similar sources have waned dramatically. If you’re looking to run a marketing campaign in the modern-day, you have a few options like PPC, social media and campaigns boosted by marketing data.
Out of all of these methods, marketing data is the closest method to those old times with the Yellow Pages, except it’s way more modernised and can save you a lot of time and money on prospecting compared to some other methods of procuring customers. In this article, we’ll be going over how marketing data can be used to boost your campaigns and your bottom line.
What is Marketing Data?
So, if you’re not familiar with data and have never actually used it before, you may be asking yourself, ‘what is marketing data?’ This question can, thankfully, be answered very simply. Firstly, it must be understood that there are a few different types of marketing data and that the type of data you would benefit from using can very much depend on your industry. For example, if you’re in the energy industry, you may benefit from Energy Renewal Data, whereas if you’re running an email marketing campaign, you will benefit from Email Marketing Data.
Broadly speaking, this format’s data can be broken down into two different types. These two types are Telemarketing Data and Email Data. Telemarketing data, true to the name, contains business details, including the business’ telephone number to allow users to rapidly call through a list of businesses to prospect new customers. This data is ubiquitous in industries where lead generation isn’t done socially.
Alternatively, email marketing data contains the business information, including an email address that can directly target those businesses. This type of data is really effective for businesses that run frequent email marketing campaigns and can massively boost the reach of said email marketing campaign.
It Can Save Your Team’s Time
Anyone who works in sales knows that lead generation can be one of the most frustrating and time-consuming business process elements. Data can help make this process a lot easier. For example, rather than trawling through social media and Google to find new businesses to target, you would be able to purchase a list of telemarketing data and distribute it to your lead generators. These lead generators would then rapidly work through the list of business telephone numbers to gain new leads.
The story is the same for email marketing data. It can take a lot of time to manually build a list of email addresses for your marketing campaign and then send out those emails, only to receive a lukewarm response. By purchasing a list of email marketing data, you will be able to rapidly build up your database so that your team can focus their time on crafting the perfect emails to get these prospects interested in what you have to offer.
We all know the common saying that time is money, which is the same with lead generation and prospecting. You want to make the most out of your team’s time, and investing in a data list can be a great way to do this.
It Can Be a Cheaper Option Than Leads
Some businesses generate their sales by purchasing quantities of leads. These businesses have already stated that they’re interested in purchasing a specific type of product or services. Leads can be a great way to generate new customers for your business, but they can also be exceedingly expensive, depending on how warmed up they are. Whether you want to purchase leads or marketing data will be down to your available marketing budget.
Marketing data itself is a lot cheaper than the leads per record, and this is since the prospect hasn’t explicitly stated that they want the product or service that your business is offering. If you have competent lead generators and a high-quality dataset, you will be able to generate a lot of customers off of the back of the data due to the sheer volume of contacts that are available for your money.
In essence, you will get a lot more marketing data for your money than you would lead, but leads offer a higher rate of conversion. This is not to say that leads will always convert, especially if you purchase low-quality leads, which can convert at a similar rate to standard marketing data. You need to ensure that you’re purchasing your data or leads from a reputable, high-quality source.
Marketing Data Can Produce a Brilliant ROI
As was previously stated, marketing data is a lot cheaper to buy in bulk than leads are, which is a part of the reason why marketing data can produce a brilliant ROI for your business. For example, if you were to buy 1,000 records of marketing data at £500 and offer a product or service at £100, you would only need to convert five customers from the list you purchased to make your money back. If you have a high-quality sales team, they should absolutely make much more than the £500 you would have spent on the data itself.
The virtual guarantee of making a profit by purchasing a list of marketing data makes it a great option for companies that are beginning to expand their marketing campaigns but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for some leads that might not convert the rate that they want. The ROI can also be much more significant dependent on factors like lead and agent quality overall.
You Can Filter Marketing Data To Your Requirement
One of the more ideal characteristics of marketing data and using it for your campaigns is that it can be adjusted to your own requirements. For example, if you want to target businesses in a certain postcode or industry, or you’re a services company and want to target customers that are using a specific supplier, you’ll be able to go to a good data provider, and they’ll be able to choose a dataset that best suits your own requirements.
This point also links into how marketing data can provide you with a great ROI, as if you make it clear in your requirement that you want to target certain types of businesses, you will save money by not wasting any time on targeting potential businesses that don’t fall into your requirements; especially if you don’t know that information about the prospect business beforehand.
If you want to make the most out of your purchase of business marketing data, you should seriously think about making your requirement specific to the types of businesses you want to target. This way, you’ll make the maximum possible ROI for your money.
Marketing Data Can Be Integrated With Your Software
Another great thing about business marketing data is that it can be integrated into your existing business software, whether you’re purchasing email marketing data or telemarketing data. For example, if you’re buying a list of telemarketing data, you will be able to feed this data into both your CRM and your dialler system. This means that you won’t have to waste time trying to configure the data with your existing systems. You can get straight into selling to your customers.
Similarly, with email marketing data, you will also easily incorporate it into your existing systems. When using email marketing data, we recommended using some form of email software due to the high potential volume of the data involved. This will save a lot of time by putting it into a system like Mailchimp. Using this software to track the open rate, bounce rate, and other statistics can be used to measure the quality of the data. This information can also be imperative if you need to send a report back to your supplier for a replacement.
Marketing Data Can Prevent Overreliance on a Few Clients
No matter what industry your business works in, it can be incredibly dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket and overly on a select few clients to ensure that your bills get paid every month. There are a number of reasons why this is short-sighted, however, the main two are the facts that your customer could either go bankrupt or even purchase from your competitors if they end up having a bad experience with your services. You run the risk of dooming your own business by conforming to this type of strategy.
This is why marketing data can be a huge help to prevent you from relying on a select number of clients. With marketing data, you will be able to consistently prospect for more customers, so even if you do lose one or two of your regular paying customers, you’ll still be able to make up the difference with all of the new customers that have been wowed by your services. You should never stop generating new business, as this is what will help you to stand the test of time and competition within your industry sector.
Things To Be Careful Of When Buying Marketing Data
Despite the fact that marketing data can be a very good investment for your business, like with anything, there are still a number of things that need to be considered if you’re going to be successful. Firstly, you need to ensure that you’re getting your data from a good source. It’s very rare that a dataset will be 100% accurate, but a good data company will offer you a free 1-1 replacement on any records that are incorrect, this ensures that you get what you pay for. Always check the terms and conditions before you order.
Additionally, when purchasing marketing data, it’s essential to ensure that the company you’re ordering from has registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). They are the supervisory authority for data-related activities in the UK, and any company that is selling marketing data must be registered. Before you purchase any data, make sure that the company has registered with the ICO by asking for their registration number.
Thankfully, Driven Media Solutions is a data company registered with the ICO. We also offer 1-1 replacement free of charge on any purchased records that are incorrect. This ensures that you get exactly what you paid for.
Conclusion
In closing, in this article, we have discussed how marketing data can be used to boost your campaigns. We discussed initially what marketing data is and the fact that it can be split into two categories. These two being telemarketing data and email marketing data. We then explained that purchasing data could be a lot more cost-effective during the start of your campaigns than buying leads. You can also tailor the data to your own specific requirement. This also speeds up the process of generating new customers for your business.
We also explained that utilizing marketing data can help companies stop relying on their existing customers. This allows them to accurately and effectively target new customers for their products and services. Now, you should also know that you’ll be able to integrate your purchased marketing data with your existing CRM for ease of use.
Finally, we discussed that you still need to be careful when purchasing marketing data. Not all companies that sell it are transparent with their customers. They may not offer fair terms such as free 1-1 replacement. Some companies may also not be registered with the ICO. It would be best to inquire about whether the company is registered with the Supervisory Authority.