Category Archives: Get Schooled

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Why Are Marketers Still Managing Their Data Manually?

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Experian QAS’ recent study “Data Quality and the Customer Experience” is a telling story for today’s data-driven marketers. To start off, here are a number of interesting insights culled from the study:

  • Less than 1% of organizations surveyed lack a data strategy.
  • 66% of respondents use a manual process like Excel to manage data and perform light analysis on that data.
  • 1/3 of respondents don’t know how much of their data is inaccurate.
  • 94% of respondents realize that some of their data is inaccurate due to incomplete, outdated, or duplicate data.
  • 65% of the time, respondents blame these inaccuracies on human error.

So, what kind of picture does that paint of today’s “data-driven” marketer? To me, it looks like organizations overwhelmingly acknowledge that data is critical to their success. A similarly overwhelming number of organizations understand that they, in fact, do have a data quality issue. Yet, for whatever reason, these organizations haven’t invested in the tools needed to rectify that issue.

My suspicion is that marketers haven’t decided to adopt an automated tool for addressing these data issues for a few key reasons:

  • The economy may be slowly righting itself, but it’s not anywhere close to full strength. That means budgets are still agonizingly hard-won battles fought in boardrooms across the land.
  • This whole idea of big data, as well as its touted benefits, is still rather new and unproven. If the status quo has worked all these years, why not wait until the picture is less murky before making a big investment.
  • The sheer number of tools available, and their panoply of features, has heads spinning. While there’s surely a goal or an ideal outcome of their data strategy, marketers may not know which tool will get them to that point.

So, what’s the answer? Marketers would benefit from first identifying the problems in their current processes, and then identify a tool that solves those problems.

If the issue is duplicate data, look for a tool that can de-duplicate databases and then merge that data into a new, unified database. If inaccurate records are plaguing the organization, it makes sense to look for a tool that includes hygiene and validation capabilities. Better yet, find a solution that can collect data right from your lead capture forms, validating and autocorrecting it as it is imported.

If you don’t understand enough about your current customers and inbound leads, look for a platform that provides appending services and enriches your contact database. Take the same approach if your database analytics are lacking. The key is identifying priorities and seeking out a tool that aligns with those priorities.

The trick, though, is not settling for a tool that bottoms out with capabilities that can only solve your current problems. You want a tool that’s going to allow you to continue to grow as a data-driven organization. Think about how you see your marketing evolving over the next one to two years, and move towards a tool that aligns with that vision. Once you can nail down these two areas of your data strategy, choosing the right tool should be much easier.

Can a Data Management Platform Help You Develop Better Buyer Personas?

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Great content is, well, great, but content marketing can’t thrive on content alone. You see, each piece of content needs to target a specific audience segment, and have well-defined goals and objectives. To be effective, it needs to resonate with the intended customer segment, and lead that segment towards a purchase. Buyer personas are well-established mechanisms for making this happen. And a data management platform (DMP) can make building those personas even easier.

What exactly are buyer personas?

Essentially, buyer personas are an archetypical representation of your customers. You can have multiple buyer personas, especially if your product serves a variety of different industries, or has tiered service structures – think MS Office Home vs. MS Office Professional. Your different user bases are not going to share all the same concerns, objectives, use cases, etc. So, you can’t expect one persona to encapsulate all of your customers.

How do you get started?

This is where a (DMP) can kick-start the process. Use the DMP to analyze your existing customers and leads. You should have the ability to track trends across criteria like company size, annual revenue, industry, etc. You can also analyze at the individual level for decision makers, influencers, or your point of contact within each company. Take into account information like age, gender, location, and any behavioral data you might have.

This is all pretty top-level stuff. It doesn’t adequately account for the psychological components of purchasing behavior. But, it does help you quickly break your database into broader segments that you can then further analyze and research.

Surveys, Interviews, and Questionnaires

This is where you really start to define your buyer personas in the necessary level of detail. Create a list of questions. Ask about your customers’ motivations for choosing your brand.  What problem were they trying to solve? How does your product help them solve those problems? Questions like these will help you unlock the psychology behind your typical customer’s purchasing process. HubSpot has a few examples of questions you can ask when building buyer personas.

Now, identify your highest value customers, and ask them these questions in an interview. If they’re happy with your product, they should be more than willing to help you out with a brief interview. If they aren’t happy with your product, well, you have bigger problems to solve.

You could also work these questions into a survey or questionnaire that you send out to current customers. Depending on response rate, this approach can yield a large amount of viable research very quickly. Another approach is joining your sales team on calls to get a sense of the mindset of potential customers. Listen to the things they like about your product, the questions they ask, and their objections.

Once you feel that you have enough research, beginning building your buyer personas. These personas should essentially look like several segments grouped along criteria like goals (the challenges they want your product to solve), behaviors (their interactions with your marketing), and demographic data.

After your personas are constructed, go back into your DMP and apply a unique identifier for each of these personas. Now you can segment both your leads and customers along these identifiers. Once you send campaigns that target these personas, apply these identifiers to any leads that come in. With this process, you can easily nurture leads on a persona basis, rather than segmenting on potentially meaningless criteria.

Final Points

It’s a good idea to limit the number of personas you actually create. Somewhere between two and four personas is right for most organizations. You could have more if you’re selling a complex product, but you don’t want to complicate the issue needlessly.

It also pays to think of these personas as if they are real people, not characters you’ve created. Do whatever it takes to make that happen. Do some roleplaying skits, have an artistically talented team member draw pictures of each persona and hang the pictures on your office’s walls, or give them names and try to reference them by those names in your marketing meetings.

Like most aspects of lead generation, buyer personas work best when you first test, measure, and iterate with smaller campaigns. You need to determine if your personas are accurate, and if you’re using the right pieces of content to market to those personas. As always, once you hit on the right formula, roll out the campaign on a much larger scale.

B2B Prospecting: Does Third-Party Data Still Have a Place?

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Before the social web, B2B prospecting thrived on tactics like using third-party data for email marketing and direct mail, cold calling campaigns, and traditional networking events like trade shows. At Marketfish, we believe that each of these tactics is still viable to a certain degree. It just depends on how the marketer uses the tactic in question, which is why we still advocate third-party mailing lists under the right circumstances. We’ll touch on that in detail later, because not everyone agrees.

The methodology, and in some cases, the tools, used to prospect today are significantly different from the tools and tactics used by marketers in the past. Sure, we can owe some of that evolutionary effect to the inexorable passing of time, but that change is also rooted in the experiences of front-line marketers. Too many were burned when working with disreputable data sources. A common complaint, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s any more acceptable.

And then social media came along positioned as this shimmering new standard for customer communication. What could be better than real-time interaction in a 1:1 format? So, with this new north star to guide us, we decided to move away our tried and true prospecting methods, the same methods that worked for years prior. Some of us even proselytized their death.

As it happens with many premature proclamations, email didn’t disappear. But, the game changed quite a bit. We need to be smarter about our use of email and third-party data. Marketers need to tailor messages to the audience; batch and blasting no longer works. Data hygiene and sender reputation are more important than ever, and each channel needs to work together in seamless conjunction.

And social media, well it would be a mistake to ignore social media. It’s now a pervasive and ubiquitous part of our personal and professional lives. At the very least, B2B marketers can see success with LinkedIn. Just check out HubSpot’s research. They found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter for lead generation. It’s still just a matter of reaching your audience at the right time and in the right location.

But social media working well isn’t justification for ignoring traditional marketing methods like licensing third-party data from reputable data sources. It just reinforces the tenet that it’s foolish to rely on a single marketing channel, and that we need to be smarter about how we actually use legacy channels.

If you don’t believe in the power of third-party prospecting data, here are a number of reasons that might change your mind:

A high-quality data provider with a deep inventory is going to give you access to email, postal, and telephone contact information for every prospects you want to reach. This means you can quickly launch multichannel campaigns, as long as you have your creative assets in place. You can easily start the prospect with a direct mail campaign, followed by a phone call, then reinforce those messages with an email. If you have a data management platform, this process will be even easier. Your data will be available in a unified database that you can easily segment and analyze.

Unlike traditional list rental, record licensing gives you access to data for an extended period of time. That means you can continue to follow up with these leads through nurturing campaigns, adapting the campaign based on any performance data you collect along the way. With list rental, it’s one and done. If you want to contact the same audience again, you need to pay for another campaign.

If you’re coming from the world of display ads or search engine marketing campaigns, the cost of high-quality data might seem exorbitant. But you can expect a better response rate. For example, with display, you might see a CTR of .05 percent and above, but with email you could see an average CTR of .5% to 1% or higher. That better response rate could mean more money in your pocket, depending on your costs and product pricing strategy. Plus, now that you have access to the data for an extended period of time, you can very easily reach out to these folks multiple times, testing different offers and messages along the way.

You also need to consider the lifetime value of your typical customer. You might pay more for your lead initially, but if that lead purchases 4-5 times from you each year, at $100 a purchase, that customer is worth $400-$500 to your organization every year. The higher initial cost of licensing records could be worth it if you think about your customer in terms of lifetime value.

Now, here are some things to keep in mind when working with third-party data:

You want to work with the best possible data provider. Cheap data just isn’t worth it; it’s the easy way to lose your shirt in marketing. Good data simply costs more, but it’s worth the price. It’s a simple fact. You’re going to get data that is generally fresher, more accurate, fully permission-based, and better performing. That’s good for both your response rates, and your sending reputation.

You want to make sure that your data provider will de-duplicate any data you license against your current database. This will ensure that you’re not licensing a record that is already own. This data provider should also offer hygiene services, and check for spam traps so you can be sure that you are not purchasing an inaccurate record, or data that is potentially harmful to your sending reputation. Alternatively, you could work with a DMP that has these services built in.

Remember that any records you license are all top-of-funnel. They might not have even heard of your brand before. You can’t go in for the kill with the first message. Think about using some top-of-funnel content to warm them up to your brand. Send them a whitepaper, tell them about a webinar you’re producing, or invite them to join your newsletter. Don’t do anything that’s overly intense, or that requires too much of a commitment.

Follow these tips and you are well on your way to successfully using third-party data. Be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

How Can a Data Management Platform Make Your Content Marketing More Effective?

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We know that content marketing is one of marketing’s hottest trends. That’s all for good reason; content marketing is an effective tool for attracting leads to your brand, educating leads about your products, and nurturing leads along the buying cycle. Plus, content marketing, at least ostensibly, embraces the idea that marketing shouldn’t be an interruption, it should be a sought out destination.

Content marketing is so popular that, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 9 out of 10 organizations market with content marketing. Those marketers use a number of tools to make and share that content with their many fans. That’s the point of content marketing, after all. But, a data management platform (DMP) doesn’t often leap out as one of those tools.

If you rethink the way you perceive a DMP, you’ll soon realize that it can help you place your top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel content in the hands of the right leads. Here’s how you can make that happen:

With the right DMP, you can attain a unified database – essentially the cornerstone of data-driven marketing. This database will house both your lead and customer data in one centralized location, all set for easy retrieval. You can then build segments, analyze those segments, deploy campaigns to those segments, and track their interactions with both your brand and your campaigns.

A unique identifier or token system is one way you can do this. When you send out campaigns to these groups, assign an identifier to each to lead or customer that takes action on a piece of content. This identifier should tie into both the action taken, and the piece of content. This will help you track KPIs like opening an email, clicking through to a landing page, or actually downloading a piece of content.

You can then use this identifier to run analyses like:

  • The effectiveness of your message subject line
  • Response rates between different audiences
  • Email and landing page copy or design
  • The title of your content or its cover design
  • Content mediums versus one another, i.e. webinar response rates compared to whitepaper response rates.

Once you run these analyses, you can better decide how to use that piece of content in the future. Does it appeal to one subset of your lead or customer database? What attributes are common to that subset? Use the content to target new leads that share those common attributes. This should help you achieve a better overall response rate for each piece of content in your repertoire.

Assuming you’ve done these analyses with top-of-funnel content, you should now know the segment of your audience that is ready for middle-of-funnel content that will advance them along the buying cycle. You should also be able to determine the audience that might not have responded to that particular piece of top-of-funnel-content, but may be ready for a different piece of top-of-funnel-content. You can then deploy a “win-back” or reengagement campaign of sorts.

In this way, your DMP is working to give you deeper insight into effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, and each segment’s receptiveness to content marketing. But the DMP can also give you insight into your audience as whole. In a sense, helping you answer those difficult top-level questions that may be plaguing your marketing strategists.

What challenges do your customers and leads face? How does your product help you solve those challenges? Is your audience receptive to content marketing overall? What type of content is most appealing to your audience? The questions are essentially endless, but all important. And with the help of a DMP, you should be better able to answer them all.

3 Data Management Tips for Ringing in the New Year

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The New Year brought its fair share of marketing predictions and trends to monitor. One of which was, unsurprisingly, big data. As the line between marketing and IT departments increasingly blurs, there’s a good chance that big data is on the minds of more than a few people at your organization.

You may have even decided that it’s finally time to invest in a tool for tackling your big data situation. For most of you, that means a data management platform. This is a significant sign of progress, but a tool is only as good as the methodology guiding its use. So, without further ado, here are three data management tips for ringing in 2013.

Run hygiene

A new year is a great time to review your house file(s) and do a bit of cleaning. The data management platform you invest in should include hygiene services – if it doesn’t, I recommend finding a different platform – so put them to good use. Make sure your hygiene service will check the validity of records, identify malformed data elements, and flag spam traps and aged records. It should also autocorrect any invalid or incorrect data, and if it can’t adequately correct your data, it should remove that data from your list.

Your hygiene service should also flag your records based on inactivity or low engagement, so that you can easily send reactivation or “win-back” campaigns to those segments. If you don’t have a hygiene service built in to your platform, you can still work with a third-party hygiene service in the traditional sense.

Lead and data capture forms are functioning

If you’re a sophisticated marketing organization, you‘re more than likely running a host of offers tied to lead capture forms. You also almost certainly have lead forms and subscription forms strategically placed on your website. Now is the time to make sure that all of your forms and links are functioning properly, and feeding data into your data management system. If they aren’t working properly, fix them.

Proper analytics in place

Effective analytics tools ensure that you see benefit from working with big data. You should have the ability to run profiles and model your data to better understand your current customers. What kind of demographic or behavioral trends can you uncover? What trends do you see when analyzing past purchase behavior?

Use the information you uncover to bolster your marketing efforts. You can use this analysis to create more relevant and targeted marketing, segment your database more accurately, and better recommend or upsell new products and services to your current customers. The possibilities are endless.

Take these considerations to heart when evaluating data management platforms, or even when attempting to better manage your data without a tool like Marketfish. If you’d like to better understand how a data management platform can help you access, manage, and understand your data more effectively, just contact us today.