How to support your marketing goals with data enrichment

Managing a team of marketers means you have a huge responsibility. You have to make sure the company’s business goals are met by generating leads, nurturing and qualifying them so the relevant ones get passed on to the sales department so they can do their thing and turn leads into customers. That requires an extensive amount of data and chances are, you’re short on some, even if you think you have it all. With a job to make all-things marketing happen, do you need to have all your bases covered?
Data enrichment, in all its forms, can be a killer weapon in delivering personalized and more relevant campaigns that ends in better engagement. Prospect research and the subsequent quality of your database directly influences the success of your marketing goals. Whether you think of databases in terms of the technology that supports them or not, the real value lies in the the data itself. Even the fanciest marketing technology powered by data that is not clean and accurate will be less effective.

In that regard, here are five ways how data enrichment can help you achieve your marketing goals.

1. Understand your competitive landscape
Trying to market in the B2B environment becomes an increasingly tougher job as the number of players rises. The truth is, no matter how great your service is, there’s always a competitor in the wings, looking to take over your market share. The SaaS industry seems particularly competitive as there is an entire range of solutions that go from the specialized and best-of-breed type to enterprise-grade types. To be effective in your marketing efforts, you need to have a clear picture of who you’re up against, both the known and unknown competitors.

Knowing where you are in the competitive landscape allows your team to get necessary insights such as each competitor’s clients (both overall number and the best ones), their geographical layout, how they compare amongst themselves, and all other relevant data. Once you get to know them, understanding your competitive landscape will help you stand out and take your prospecting effort to the next level. In addition, it will also reveal businesses that might be your potential users, adding a new group of data to work with.

2. Better lead generation and segmentation
One of the most sought-after reasons for third-party data is to uncover new leads. The need to generate new leads based on ideal customer profiles is stronger than ever before as enrichment is not just about getting the contact information right, it’s also about numerous data categories such as:

Industry
Location
Size
Typical tech stack
Relevant website traffic range

By perfecting your data set, you also improve segmentation and targeting, creating a more accurate and on-topic experience. Segmenting your prospects and tailoring campaigns accordingly allows you to produce more contextual campaigns that will improve your nurturing and qualifying effort, making sure only marketing qualified leads go to sales. As a result, you get to be more effective in your marketing efforts by targeting the right prospect at the right time, especially when it comes to the most profitable ones where you focus on acquiring prospects of similar stature. These factors have immense influence over whether a lead will become a sales qualified lead.

3. Staying on top of decision-makers
While B2B marketers typically aim and struggle to collect more and more data on their prospects and existing customers, they face even more important challenges. According to one research study, one of the growing challenges to maintaining data quality isn’t the lack of relevant data on current customers, instead it’s the lack of fresh data. To overcome this challenge, many B2B marketers turn to outside help to enrich their contact databases and get rid of old and outdated data that includes, for the most part, contact information on relevant position holders.

Vital business decisions are based on the quality of data stored in the CRM. B2B people are on the move all the time. Whether they get promoted, move positions or change companies altogether, you need to stay abreast of these developments. Staying on top of decision-makers by enriching information with third-party data (unless you want to keep it old school and fill out your little black book contact by contact) allows the marketing department to produce content specifically aimed at each of them so that sales can get in front of them later on.

4. Gaining insights on what drives and motivates decision makers
Data enrichment transforms a marketer’s limited view of a lead’s details into a more reliable and tangible profile. Above all, it enhances that profile with the level of critical insights needed to put to the test your marketing strategies. Learning more about who your target audience is, what makes them tick, as well as what they want requires the ability to understand what motivates them, as well as how they make decisions. Unreliable data severely hampers the progress of any marketing campaign as all it ends up with are numerous missed opportunities and wasteful time and resource management.

Technographics, in particular, can be extremely valuable when you figure out what a company’s tech stack says about them. You can get a better understanding of your competitive landscape and focus on the companies that are most relevant for your needs (the type of business, their monthly visits, multiple technology combinations, etc.). For instance, do they concentrate on scaling rather than ease-of-use with their technology choices? Do they prefer the best-of-breed solution as opposed to all-in-one? Are there any overlapping technologies that you could exploit?

All these insights can help broaden your initial focus, find new potential business verticals to tap into, as well as other technologies and geographies to attack next. Every part of the tech stack can provide information for your strategies and messaging. You may even reveal the next emerging trend your company should be catering to.

5. More precise and targeted content
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), with the right data at your disposal, you’ll end up with a better tailored messaging for each of your prospective clients. These days, personalization can be all the difference between marketing that indeed converts and marketing that merely attempts to convert. Data facilitates a better lead generation and nurturing process that yields targeted campaigns (everything from media campaigns to contextual content marketing campaigns and social media campaigns) is your way of understanding the variations in your audience and meeting their expectations for a superior experience. In a way, you need to humanize your data and go beyond the few basic information fields in the CRM to truly engage with your audience. Your data needs to be on-point and evolve with the people it aims to reach.

Data enrichment as a competitive edge
In the B2B world, data deteriorates quicker than a new version of Microsoft software needing to be patched. Data is the most valuable asset any modern enterprise can possess. Tomorrow’s winners will be the companies that have complete command over their data. Refining it to increase its raw value means adding value to your marketing goals, be it a lead generation campaign, up-to-date information on decision-makers, or else. All those additional data points will become your competitive edge, allowing you to make smarter decisions and gain priceless insights that will drive your marketing effort through highest relevance and quality. Don’t be caught surprised by your own data. In today’s tech-drive world, there is absolutely no justification for it.