Everyone talks about target marketing, improving the focus of their marketing camapigns and going for the personalized marketing approach. There are discussions on how to get efforts more targeted and then people are assigned to overhaul the website to make it appeal to different market segments or decision making levels. Some are assigned to developing different email content, website content, downloadable documents which are specially made for each target buyer segment while others are busy brainstorming other ideas on how to woo each target market segment with a message which will strike a chord with them. Has anyone checked to see if the contacts in the company marketing database are segmented accordingly? Ooops!
You can’t run targted marketing campaigns on data which has not been segmented! Segmenting your data is step one to planning a targeted marketing campaign as soon as you’ve identified who your customers are. Even if you have a single product for example: a payroll management software for the hospitality industry, its still possibly to customize messages and campaigns for the Payroll decision maker, the VP of Human Resources and the CFO. Alternatively you may want to hit C-Level executives with a with a high level overview on how you product or solution can help their business and hit those directly responsible and those who will use your solution with a more detailed message. In either case, however you decide to plan your segmentation and target messages, your database and business contacts need to be segmented and sorted accordingly.
To do this the team responsible for data management and data cleansing needs to come together with the team thats planning out the targeted marketing strategy, understand their common objectives and sync the data accordingly. Well tagged data which has complete information such as contact level, contact organization, department, contact type and similar attributes are far easier to sort compared to contacts which consist of names and contact details. For example if you need a list of VP-Level contacts from the Finance organization, the data can be easily sorted IF each contact was associated with these fields. Scheduling a periodic data enrichment effort along with your data cleansing and maintainence routine will help ensure these attributes are added to your data which makes it easier to manage when needed in future.
So before you plan your next targeted marketing campaign, check to see if your data meets your segmentation needs. If it’s not, there’s some work to be done.