How to win business using marketing data [Infographic]

Using data for marketing campaigns

Even with all the discussion of content marketing, buying in data to support sales campaigns and increase the customer base is still crucial to many companies to grow their business, even though the starting point for some businesses is to focus on relationships with their current or lapsed customers and advocacy/referrals. Although the traditional sales funnel has changed and social media provides more opportunities for outreach, this doesn't mean that buying in external data lists is extinct. Far from it, you can still supplement data collected from other sources.

If you're looking for data and how to use it effectively for your marketing channels, whether email, direct mail, outbound or mobile? This infographic from The Data Octopus provides tips for addressing this process :

1. Proposition and Target market: I won’t explain how to suck eggs as we are all familiar with this.
2. Legally compliance: Ask the right questions to ensure the data is legally complaint ie. screened against TPS, MPS ? how is it cleaned for unsubscribes? How often? 'Data decays at 35% a year’ – don’t damage your brand by using saturated lists and those which are not compliant! The same applies to in-house data lists and mailing campaigns, regardless of the channel.
3. Choosing the right channel: Choosing the right range of channels to connect and engage, think about the quality of the data (information gaps and recency of updates) and also which channel(s) are most effective.
4. Reaching the right decision-maker: This depends on the channel used whether it’s email, direct mail or outbound calls. It’s about applying the right best practices for engagement which we are familiar with i.e. Email – important to think about the subject line, design of email template and CTAs. Tele-sales - The infographic refers to sales script and timing of day.  It could include other key elements such as researching your decision-maker on social media channels, finding a ‘common theme’ to hook /engage in conversation aswell