Well, that’s my feeling about creating a targeted data set. Buying is sometimes right, but often, building your own is so much better.
Before I start on the pro and cons, I have to say, for some target markets there are some very good niche data suppliers out there, in which case buying is a no brainer.
However, there are many companies that are just not happy with the quality of data they buy.
“The aim is to have a data set the truly represents your buyers and is up-to-date. “
Any data you purchase must be within your ideal client profile, if not then any interaction is going to be fruitless; if it’s out-of-date then it’s going to be annoying and time consuming to fix it.
Therein lays the problem with purchasing data: Is it accurate for my needs and is it up-to-date.
Is It Accurate For My Needs?
Firstly, you need to know your target audience. You need to know the ideal company profile as well as your ideal contact profile.
If you’re not sure about this, then start analysing your customer base and think about whom your product or service will benefit.
Be very specific with the profile definitions, you will need to give this to your data suppliers to define the data you want.
For company profiles, know the geographies, industry sectors, size in terms on revenue and employee counts, etc. For contacts, know the job titles, job roles and job levels; know which contact details you need for communication, emails, phone numbers or addresses.
Then asses your data supplier on these 4 criteria;
- Do they have all the companies I want?
- Do they have all the contacts I want?
- Do they have all the contact details I want?
- How up-to-date is this information?
Many data suppliers will not have all of the above. They may have some companies, some contacts and some of the contact details.
Is It Up-To-Date?
The data must be current. Have you tried using old data? I’ve done this and trust me, calling old contacts is very frustrating when you hear they are no longer there all the time. Emailing old data just creates more hard bounces and very low click-through rates. Also, direct mailing becomes a big waste of money with mailing returns and low responses.
In my experience, it’s rare to find a general data supplier that has all the information you require. For some niches, the data is available.
Only if you are satisfied with the above criteria should you purchase.
Purchasing incomplete, inaccurate data can be more harmful then you think. It can be a waste of time with campaigns not delivering results, it lowers the data quality of your CRM data jeopardising future campaigns and users start to lose confidence in the data.
The one big advantage of building your data set is that you can control the quality.
Whether you collect the data yourself, or hire a company do to so, you can ensure you pick the right companies, right contacts, right contact details and it will be current.
The downside is that it takes time, but when you think about how much better the results are then it becomes obvious that having high quality data is the only option.
- You can reuse the data for future campaigns
- You gain user confidence
- Your gain senior management confidence
- You increase sales
- And so on.
Once you have good quality data, remember B2B data degrades at 22% a year, so you will need to repeat the exercise every 6 or 12 months. This could involve just identifying who’s moved and replacing them with the right contacts.
There is a third option…
Company data does not change as much as contact data, so often you can find company data that is reliable.
You could purchase company data and use that as a basis to create your own contact data.
In fact, I highly recommend this option. The purchase of company data can accelerate the targeted data set building process.
Conclusion
Make sure you have the right data, and all the data for your audience, not too little (missing part of the audience) or too much (non-audience data), but the right amount for the size of your targeted audience. Finally, make sure it’s current and stays current.
This sounds obvious, but so many organisations suffer from poor targeted data. If you want to create that high quality data propelling your marketing campaigns then give us a call.