B2B demand generation is getting tougher than ever before. Mass marketing is dead. Direct marketing is ignored. Email marketing has turned into a spray and pray tactic. But sales quotes have remained the same and are growing. In this situation, its imperative for every marketer to think outside the box – I know everyone says so, but I mean it. And you really need to be creative and different, both.
One of the foundational elements of B2B demand generation is your lead database. With mass marketing techniques, you relied on large subscription databases and rented lists that everyone, including your competitors, were using. But with mass marketing dead, most marketers are still relying on the same old sources for their lead databases: rented lists, magazine subscribers, subscription databases and so on. They don’t work anymore. They provide the same data (which is heavily error prone in the first place) to everyone. They lack depth – you know contact names and titles, but nothing more. Besides, everyone and their mother is marketing to the same people, and they are getting ignored.
Its time to rethink this fundamental variable for your B2B demand generation success. You need to be creative with your lead database. You need to focus. You need to understand who are your key influencers. You need to learn more about them. You need to find your influencers based on their exact current roles and not just templatized titles. You need to develop a strong sales research process that helps you identify the specific contacts who your message is bound to resonate with. Sales research will help you create targeted databased for your campaigns and is bound to drastically improve you response rates.
Its never late to start.