Think First, Buy Later When Purchasing B2B Data
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The process of buying B2B data is a complex one with many key questions to consider before a sensible decision can be made, finds Antony Begley - Database Marketing
Even for the experts, marketing to businesses is in many ways a far more complicated and complex procedure than marketing to consumers, which goes a long way to explaining why so few of the country’s Marketing Service Providers attempt to cover B2B & B2C markets. Marketing to businesses is an infamously difficult task with the scarcity of unique data sources making buying B2B data a task that requires experience and skill.
With more suppliers than ever before providing a UK B2B universe that can be used for prospecting and many other applications in database marketing, how should B2B marketers go about ensuring they are using their scarce budgets as effectively as possible? Is it best to source data from a single universe or to build from available lists? Or perhaps create a permanent multi-sourced prospect pool? And what are the best criteria for choosing a data vendor?
B2C has scale on its side, for one thing. If you’re selling a relatively low cost, low margin product you can take the easy route and simply fire out a straightforward one size fits all pricebased offer to a huge compiled universe list and rely on the strength and sheer weight of numbers to deliver sales for you. You know that there are far cleverer ways of going about the process and you’re pretty sure that you could push the ROI considerably further north, but if it ain’t broke why go to the hassle and risk of trying to fix it? Well, even in 2010, that’s still the clunky, untargeted, cack-handed approach taken by many B2C marketers. But that sort of approach simply doesn’t work in when you’re selling to businesses.
Choice of channel is, of course, an increasingly tricky issue to tackle as the number of channels available continues to grow, with social media the most complex case in poin. Does it work for B2B marketing purposes? The jury’s out. One channel that has matured sufficiently to permit a fuller understanding of its strengths and weaknesses is email marketing, . “It looks cheap so everybody piled into out, but it turns out that it isn’t quite as cheap as it looked to do well. “I think we’ve come round to the notion now that it’s actually relatively expensive to do it properly and it’s far more successfully used for generating awareness than customer acquisition.
” Marketscan Business Development Director Daryl Jay agrees that the email bubble has burst to a certain extent: “Email response rates in B2B have been falling for a long time now and people are just turning off now. Don’t get me wrong, email is still popular and can be very effective when executed well, but email is no longer the holy grail.” So does that mean that good old fashioned direct mail is back on the leaderboard? Jay again: “Direct mail never went away, but I think marketers, both B2B and B2C, have realised that combining email with mail with the telephone gives you the best possible chance at maximising ROI.” According to Jay, paper is not dead, and never will be. Direct mail will by necessity get more targeted and focused and personalised, but its future is secure.
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