Data is the key to informing your marketing strategy. With it, you understand who your customers are, how you can serve them better, and how to find more leads just like them. While the rewards for upgrading your database marketing capacity are great, it’s important to choose the database services that fit your needs. Here’s how to get this vital facet of your marketing plan right the first time.
Define Your Goals
Database-driven marketing can do so much, but knowing what you need it to do goes a long way toward choosing the right solution for you. If you’re a newer company that’s prioritizing brand-building, you’re going to have a different perspective on what you need than an established business that has lead generation or customer retention as its focus. Another possibility here is to choose a marketing company that offers a full suite of database services that can grow with you as your business matures and evolves.
Know Where Your Audience Is
Different database management solutions emphasize different marketing channels, and you may not be reaching them if you’re putting effort into what you think will reach them. Here’s where a thorough understanding of your leads as they are, not as you imagine them to be, is critical. Social media may be a primary method for B2B businesses to connect with their end users, but it may not be the ideal channel for reaching the decision-making executives above them. To make a difference with them, you may need to realign your focus on in-depth content marketing that gives end users something concrete to take to executives and influence their decisions.
Learn Where Your Competitors Aren’t
The B2B realm puts competitors in much closer contact than B2C marketing typically does. Your audience is narrow but deep, and that often places your representatives at the same tradeshow they attend and your ads appearing alongside theirs in trade publications. With inevitable crowding in the marketplace, how do you stand out? One of the best ways is to be where your competition hasn’t yet made inroads, but spotting these vistas of untapped attention is a challenge. Database marketing helps you see these clear channels so you can be where your customers are without having to elbow for position.
Go Omni-Channel
Your customers are already experiencing an uninterrupted flow from one platform to another in their daily lives. They check email on their phones, then respond to it at the office or from their laptops during their commute. You need to be present in all those places to serve them well. Inbound marketing is more necessary than ever, but don’t neglect the importance of outbound marketing channels too. Paid search, retargeting, and telemarketing are essential elements in a fully realized data-assisted marketing strategy too. Database marketing makes the difference here because it tells you how to prioritize your omni-channel marketing plan and how your message needs to adapt to each channel to make the greatest difference.
Data drives marketing to an unprecedented degree, but without the right database services to implement your strategy, you can’t get the results you want. Moving up to database marketing that tells you more about your audience and reveals details about your leads can make the difference between modest gains and soaring success.
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