Good data is critical to marketing success. How you manage your data is a major factor in the quality of your data. One way to ensure you get the most out of your data is to prioritize building a centralized marketing database to aggregate information from across all of your marketing programs. Building a centralized marketing database makes it possible to:
- Better profile prospects to identify active sales opportunities.
- Improve campaign targeting to ensure the right message is reaching the right prospects.
- Minimize the duplication of effort by not targeting the same individuals with different campaigns to learn the same information.
- Avoid costs by suppressing unqualified candidates from your marketing programs.
- Simplify measurement and reporting across marketing campaigns.
- Better track lead opportunities from source to sale.
Fortunately, building a centralized marketing database isn’t difficult and can be accomplished with readily available tools. The most important and challenging part is developing the structure of your database based on your established qualification criteria. With this as a starting point, you can then expand your customer profile to include peripheral information not necessarily linked to lead qualification but helpful to know to support the sales process.
The next step is to filter and merge your prospect data from each program to update records and collect valuable data points that will further help you understand each prospect’s buying potential. While doing this, be careful to closely evaluate each record to identify and eliminate duplicate records. It’s often helpful to use a third-party, publicly available information to update addresses and standardize company names to streamline this comparison.
Finally, once the process of building a centralized marketing database is complete, you can begin using that data to improve the performance of your marketing programs. This can be done through segmentation for targeting or simply by prioritizing candidates for future follow-up. For a more robust solution, consider incorporating a marketing automation solution to help manage data updates, track prospect behavior and do lead scoring to simplify the identification of even more lead opportunities.
