We all are customers. Every single day we are making purchasing decisions whether they are related to work or our personal lives. Our buying decisions are influenced by the marketing campaigns from companies trying to engage with us. The relevance and the context of these marketing campaigns create the customer experience, which influences the buying decision to a very large extent. Marketing Database Analytics frameworks is the key tool that helps modern data driven marketers understand this behavior and leverage the insights to build contextual campaigns.
This customer experience, which is powered by marketing databases, is a key factor that differentiate the high performing and growth-focused marketing organizations.
When it comes to managing the marketing database and getting the most out of them, there are 3 core competencies:
The ability of the marketing organizations to have real-time insights into the health of the database via database health metrics reports and dashboards.
Operational frameworks and procedures to continuously track and optimize the quality integrity of the database, which is constantly changing.
Marketing Analytics capabilities to mine the database for segmentation to enable contextual experiences for all marketing campaigns, which in turn drive higher engagement and accelerate pipeline generation.
Some of the most innovative marketing organizations that we have had the privilege of working with have put in place advanced capabilities to get the most out of their marketing database. We have enabled such organizations to easily mine customer data and gather insights around how customers would like to be marketed to, thorough which channels, with what kind of offers and above all, to apply those actionable insights for executing contextual marketing campaigns. This is
a key competitive advantage that differentiates the best performing marketing organizations especially the ones that are focused on growth marketing.
Marketing Database Management almost always comes up in all conversations related to marketing operations and continues to be a key priority for the CMOs and marketing leaders across all organizations. Marketing Database is a gold mine for any sales and marketing organization 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.
This results in a gradual deterioration of the quality of the marketing database, which in turn leads to the poor performance of campaigns.
Thanks to the modern marketing tech stack, marketing organizations are already enriching their database by capturing insights around engagements that customers are doing with their campaigns. These insights come not only from an organization’s website or campaigns but from all kinds of 3rd party data vendors who specialize in providing information that signals a buying behavior and intent. 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 been 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, modern marketing organizations need a comprehensive database management strategy that goes beyond fancy data tools and is actually powered by a thoughtful plan around leveraging these insights as key part of their marketing strategy.
As part of our marketing analytics and database insights services, we undertake a detailed analysis of the marketing database across marketing automation, CRM platforms and prepare a comprehensive visual dashboard (with data drill down and slicing capabilities) that provides visibility into the health of the database. Such a report provides visibility into the health of database across the KPIs like Industry, Job Functions, Accounts Coverage (for ABM campaigns), Lead Source, Engagement, Lead Age, etc. For all our customers, we have seen that database health metrics 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 database augmentation projects so as to get maximum ROI for such database related investments.
The real value adds for the database health insights is to enable micro-segmentation for all marketing campaigns especially for events and field marketing campaigns. When it comes to segmentation and list building for the campaigns, most of the marketing organizations still rely on explicit data (mainly demographics data). This does not seem to do justice to the massive investments that the organizations make in the marketing tech stacks.
We are helping 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 tech platforms that could be used in building what we call as “micro-segments” for contextual campaigns. Leveraging our advanced marketing analytics competencies, we are helping our customers build these micro-segments and then align messaging, offers and channels accordingly to drive higher engagement rates across all their programs. This concept of micro-segmentation is fascinating to see it in-action and this case study about webinar registrations paints a beautiful picture of the extraordinary results that can be achieved with this approach.
One of our customers (a SaaS start-up) had been seeing good engagement and pipeline influence from their webinars as demonstrated by the campaign performance reports that we had built. They were planning on further investing in webinars to accelerate pipeline generation and wanted to make sure that they can increase conversions both in terms of engagement and pipeline from their webinars. During our initial discussion and data analysis for webinar campaigns data, we realized that there were a lot of insights that the webinar segments were missing out on leveraging as they were primarily relying on demographics data for driving webinar registrations. Leveraging our database insights frameworks, we helped them put together a comprehensive webinar strategy powered by micro-segmentation. In our 1st project together, instead of 1 segment for the webinar, we helped them put together 4 different micro-segments. One of the micro-segment was of those leads who had been actively engaging with the webinars over a given time. This particular webinar was meant for practitioners (rather than for the decision-makers) so we helped them discover few insights about the practitioner persona to appeal to the practitioners who were seen as using their products on a day to day basis. We even took this 1 step further and helped them further categorize the practitioner segment into 3 different micro-segments based on the past 90 days of the web behavior and engagement on their platform and their pipeline history with this organization.
With these insights, their team was able to craft unique contextual messaging for each of the micro-segments resulting in 16% improvement in webinar registrations.
This case study reinforces the fact that marketing database is a gold-mine for any marketing organization. Given that marketing database is the foundation of any marketing and sales playbook, database insights are relevant for all marketing campaigns and sales conversations.
With the right database strategy and analytics capabilities, it can deliver extraordinary results.
We understand that all these micro segmentations need a little bit extra work for crafting the messaging that is relevant for each of these micro-segments but this is what modern marketing is all about – the intersection of art and science of marketing powered by data and analytics to execute increasingly personalized and contextual campaigns.
We did not have to go anywhere to get these additional insights for the webinar micro-segments. They were right there in the marketing automation and crm platforms that our customer was already using. We just had to understand the business questions, mine the data accordingly to surface the insights and make them easily available for the marketers. We started with the key (and extremely relevant) business question from sales and marketing leaders. We then reviewed what we could answer with the capabilities we had put in place based on earlier asks (customer journey frameworks in this case), had follow-up discussions to understand further what was being asked for, how it would be used and then we went about building the solution with the set of tools we already had in the organization. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we did not jump to get the fanciest martech tools and then started figuring out how to use them and if they were of any relevance for what the business needs were. Déjà vu!
We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around how they are staying at the top of their organization’s gold mine – the marketing database. What does marketing database management strategy look like at your organization? What are the key metrics and operational procedures you have in place to maintain the quality and integrity of the database in your organization?