Marketing Database Management Consulting Services
Our Marketing Database Management Services help marketers to get real-time insights into the health of their data spread across the marketing tech stack. Marketing Database is a gold mine for any sales and marketing organization. It is this gold mine from which qualified prospects are identified who end up becoming paying customers and accelerating the growth of companies. Given how critical marketing database is for any marketing organization, one would think that organizations go an extra mile to maintain the quality and integrity of the marketing database at their companies. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case.
It is not that importance of marketing database is low on the list of priorities for any marketing organization but database maintenance is such a time consuming, expensive and on-going activity that marketers just cannot keep up with it resulting in a gradual deterioration of the quality of marketing database, which in turn lead to poor performance of marketing campaigns. This is the case with most of the marketing organizations but we will make sure that your organization is not one of those.
Thanks to the modern marketing tech stack, marketing organizations are now able to gather insights into all kinds of engagements a prospect or a customer has shown with any of their assets or tactics over a given period of time. And, these insights come not only from an organization’s own website or tactics but from different kinds of 3rd party vendors who specialize in providing any information that signals an intent to buy the goods or services that the organization is in business of providing.
All such insights are nothing but a very large amount of data whether in the form of “who” the person is or “what” the person has engaging with over the internet. This data is what we at marqeu refer to as the “goldmine” for any marketing organization. To make the most of this goldmine, a modern marketing organization needs a comprehensive database management strategy to maintain the quality and integrity not only of the existing database but also of any new data that is being acquired by the organization through any channel.
When it comes to marketing database health insights, we have found that most of the marketing leaders have a very limited to no visibility. Some organizations have identified the key metrics to track the health of their customer and prospects databases but the visibility and analysis is non-existent or done at an ad-hoc level at the best. Our database management services changes that for good. We go by the simple principle that if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
First step in our database related engagements is to help understand the key metrics that organization uses to track the health of their marketing database. We combine these inputs with the KPIs from our database management and marketing analytics framework to undertake a detailed analysis of the database and prepare a comprehensive visual report (with data slicing capabilities) that provides visibility into the health of your database. Apart from the organization specific KPIs, such a report provides the visibility into the health of database across the KPIs like Industry, Job Functions, Accounts Coverage, Lead Source, Engagement, Lead Age etc.
We use such a report as the baseline for other database management services/projects (database normalization, enrichment, augmentation etc.) so that we are able to demonstrate a measurable impact of our database management services.
Across all our customers, we have seen that database health metrics reports and dashboards have proven to be super helpful when it comes to planning for new marketing campaigns, inquiry/MQL goals, understanding what channels are bringing in quality/engaged leads and planning the spend for list buys/database augmentation projects so as to get maximum returns for such database related investments.
It is a well known fact that the modern marketing tech stack captures tremendous amounts of demographic and behavioral data about the prospects and customers. When it comes to segmentation and list building for the campaigns, most the marketing organizations still reply on the explicit data (mainly demographics). This does not seem to be doing justice to the massive investments that the organizations make in the marketing tech stack. At marqeu, we have helped all our customers think beyond the usual demographics data (like role, job level, location etc.) when it comes to building segments for their campaigns. There are a lot of hidden insights that are captured by marketing automation platforms that could be used in building what we call as “micro-segments” for contextual campaigns. Leveraging our advanced analytics competencies, we are helping our customers build these micro segments and then align messaging, offers accordingly to drive amazing results across all their programs.
A brief case study demonstrates the impact of this service in the best way possible: one of our customers used to send the webinar invites with 1 messaging copy to all their prospects and customers. The engagement rates for such emails were just fine but the challenges was the trends had started pointing to a declining engagement rate with the campaigns. This declining trend presented an opportunity for us to try something different and demonstrate the impact of micro segments.
Given how critical webinars are as part of their marketing mix, this customer of ours wanted to address this issue as soon as possible. During our engagement, we realized that there were lot of insights that the webinar segments were missing out on leveraging and we helped them with using these insights via 5 different micro-segments. One of the segment was for those leads who had been actively engaging with the webinars over a given period of time. This particular webinar was seen as most relevant for the practitioners (rather than for the decision makers) so we helped them with few data points about the practitioner persona so as to appeal to the practitioners who were using their products on a day to day basis. We even took this 1 step further and helped them categorize the practitioner segment into 3 different segments based on the past 90 days of the web behavior and engagement on their platform and their pipeline history with this organization. We realize that all these micro segmentations needed a little bit extra work on crafting the messaging that was relevant for those micro segments but this is what modern marketing is all about. We did not have to go anywhere to get these additional insights. They were right there in their marketing automation and crm platforms. We just had to surface them and make them easily available for the marketers for segmentation and from there on, it was nothing but the feelings of enthusiasm along with the extraordinary results with upto 35% improvement in the conversion rates and 14% increase in the webinar registrations.
This case study just reinforces the fact that marketing database is a gold-mine for any marketing organization and if used in the right way, it can deliver extra ordinary results.
TAM analysis and Accounts Planning are more of annual or sometimes quarterly exercises where in we engage with the sales and marketing leaders to undertake a deep dive into the health of the accounts that are present in their CRM platforms and come up with the insights along with the comparisons with Total Addressable Market (TAM) for their products and services. These strategic services are used to align sales and marketing when it comes to Account Based Marketing (ABM) and Field Sales/Marketing planning especially for events. For these deep-dives, we use the data with in the CRM platform along with the demographic KPIs (like geography, revenue, employee ranges, industry) and company specific KPIs (like account type – customer/prospect/partner, within the pipeline).
The one thing that is constant about marketing database is that it is always changing. Marketing gets its data from different sources (from list buy, organic traffic, sales reps, in-person events etc.) and it is almost impossible to manage all the sources (most of them are outside the control of the organization) of the data to control its quality. At the same time, to execute targeted campaigns and accurately score the leads that come in, the data quality has to be pretty good else it impacts the results for the marketing organization. Bad data is a problem that every marketing organization faces. At marqeu, with our extensive experience in the field of marketing data and analytics, we have developed a framework to tackle this most widespread problem with in all marketing organizations. With our database normalization framework, our customers have seen huge gains both in terms of engagement with their campaigns – thanks to laser focused targeting with accurate and standardized data and accurate scoring.
As part of this service, we standardize all the key segmentation and lead scoring fields across the marketing database both in marketing automation and CRM platforms. The most common fields include: Industry, Functional Role, Job Level (to help with differentiated messaging/nurtures for Marketing Executives and Practitioners), Geography (state, country), account demographics (like revenue range, employee range etc).
Such projects span across 2 phases:
- One time (offline in SQL, Excel or similar data analysis platforms) standardization of all the existing data in marketing database and then updated in marketing automation and crm platforms.
- Build batch campaigns and workflows across marketing automation and crm platforms to automatically standardize any net new data that comes in.
Each lead and contact in the marketing database has a varying degree of completeness when it comes to the key information – both demographic and firmographic. To make sure that marketing campaigns are successful both in the terms of driving engagement and pipeline, they have to be very targeted and the leads coming in have to be accurately scored. This can only happen when there is a high degree of completeness for each record across the database and this is where the “Data Enrichment” services come in.
Database enrichment is implemented with the help of database vendors and platforms, which connect with marketing automation and CRM platforms directly to continuously enrich and update each lead. There are many data vendors out there who can perform these enrichment activities but to get the maximum out of these investments and see actual results, these services and the additional data they append to the existing lead and contacts have to be aligned with how the database is organized and standardized with in an organization. We make sure that these services are implemented in the most efficient way form the very beginning so that the organizations are able to see the results right from the beginning. We build batch programs and workflows to make sure that we can control what new data gets appended and updated so as to maintain the integrity and usability of the data in accordance with how an organization runs its business and captures data about its customers and prospects through different channels.
These services also help with email and phone validation so as to get rid of bad data that is consuming up database space in marketing automation and CRM platforms. This in-turn helps with driving better deliverability rates for the email campaigns.
With the growing focus on Account Based Marketing (ABM) across the marketing organizations, Leads to Account (L2A) matching has emerged as a key requirement for these ABM campaigns. We have seen many new companies offering L2A matching as an add-on and expensive services. Given the popularity of the ABM and the value matching leads to accounts add to the ABM campaigns, many of our customers had expressed in this functionality across their marketing automation and CRM platforms.
When we started working on ABM campaigns more than 3 years back, we too realized how critical efficient L2A is for the success of ABM campaigns and started working on exploring it further.
We always tend to focus on keeping thing simple and sticking with the basics. We applied the same approach to L2A as well and realized that the solution to L2A was already built in the existing marketing automation and CRM platforms (especially Salesforce.com). With a couple of workflows and some minor customizations, this capability could be set-up natively within in the platform without spending any additional money on the new tools or platforms. We shared our approach and the results (which were in some cases better than the those from the ABM or L2A matching tools) with customers and they were blown away to see the matching accuracy and match percentages. Almost all of our customers have implemented our L2A framework natively with in the CRM platform and it has been a great success.
Our L2A algorithm allows for real-time matching of leads to their sales owned accounts so that account executives (AEs) get real-time alerts for all the new leads that come in from their accounts (especially their target and ABM accounts) and at the same time, marketing gets to store the account information (like Account type – customer vs prospect, open opportunities, account owner etc.) about each lead with in the marketing database, which in-turn helps with micro-segmentation for contextual campaigns.
More and more organizations are shifting away from the “spray and pray” approach to marketing campaigns where in each opted-in contact in the database is targeted with every campaign that the organization is executing or plans to execute. Marketing leaders are realizing that by focusing on “quality” rather than “quantity” of the leads, they are able to drive more meaningful results from their investments especially from sales perspective. This is where “buyer persona” has proved to be of immense value for the marketing organizations. Developing buyer persona and aligning marketing strategy with the needs of those buyers has produced phenomenal results for our customers.
At marqeu, we leverage our expertise in analytics and data mining to help build these buyer persona for the marketing teams and enable them with the key data points (demographics, web engagement, external data – web crawlers, pipeline data) that are used to develop the messaging and offers, which are very relevant for these persona leading to unprecedented increase in the engagement rates with the marketing campaigns.
All leads and contacts in marketing databases could be classified into 2 buckets:
- active (engaging with the marketing campaigns, website)
- in-active (have not shown any engagement with the marketing campaigns, no website activity).
In-active contacts imply that they are either not in the market or they are not finding the usual marketing tactics, offers, messaging engaging enough. Nevertheless, these in-active contacts affect the usual conversion rates of the campaigns and are always the ones that are most probable to opting out of receiving any marketing communication if they are repeatedly being sent the same messaging over the same channels.
The very first step in the “in-active contacts management” is to identify and isolate such contacts with in the active/production marketing database. Different organizations define the “in-active” contacts in a different way. The best practices recommend looking at a time period of the past 360 days and in that time period, if a lead has not engaged with the marketing campaigns – inbound or out-bound, such a contact should be marked as in-active. As part of this service, we tag such contacts separately with in the marketing database (in the marketing automation platform) so that they are excluded from the day to day campaigns.
Such contacts and leads should be tagged appropriately across marketing automation and crm platforms but tagging in-active contacts is not an end in itself. They need a well thought out re-engagement strategy to drive engagement. They definitely should not be deleted right away unless a well though out “re-engagement strategy” is executed. As soon as such contacts engage with re-engagement campaigns, such contacts are no longer classified as being in-active and are automatically made available to be pulled in the segments for the campaigns relevant to their persona and behavior. This approach of actively managing the marketing database has helped many of customers reduce the opt-out rates and at the same time increasing the engagement rates by up to 20%.
Let’s discuss how we can improve the integrity and availability of your marketing database.