Acquiring current and accurate B2B data can be difficult from data suppliers. They tend to be good for senior positions, but problems arise if you want positions lower than this or you want contacts in niche segments.
Whatever you’re looking for, currency will be a problem. Is the contact that you were supplied current? Some vendors have current data but many do not. To be honest, it’s not easy to keep B2B data current with job mobility at 11-15% per year, a lot of maintenance is required to keep a database current.
It’s worth commissioning your own web research. The data will be accurate and current at the point of research, so your marketing campaigns will be based on good quality data.
You might think the cost of commissioning a research project is expensive, yes, it will be more than buying data, but surprisingly low compared to its benefits.
If you commission 1,000 contacts to be research, it may cost you £3 per contact to get hold of a phone number, validation of contact, a LinkedIn URL, an email and other contact details.
Let’s say your marketing campaigns converts to sales at a rate of 2% (hopefully a lot more in reality because this is a very targeted dataset) then that’s 20 sales from 1,000 contacts. You would need an average order value of less than £150 to break even, so for most B2B companies it’s a no-brainer to commission such a project.
In fact, here’s a formula to calculate your ROI percentage:
(The mathematicians amongst you will point out that ‘#Contacts’ can be cancelled, but it’s here for clarity.)
Let’s see this in an example with 1,000 contacts, with an average order value of £500 and a sales conversion of 3% on this highly targeted data, we have:
In most cases this will be very positive mainly because you are targeting current and accurate data. As you can see, marketing has better returns then financial markets, hence why strong companies grow.
But let’s not forget these two very important facts:
- The remaining 97% of prospects who did not buy through the initial campaign will have a certain percentage who will buy within a two-year period, making the ROI considerable bigger when measured across the time the data is used
- Although the average order value is £500, the real figure that most business owners will be interested in is the Customer Life-Time Value. If on average a customer stays with you for 3 years and makes 5 purchases, then a value of £2,500 per customer is acquired. The ROI now looks huge!
Just want to make a point about B2B data and why it’s good to research. Companies advertise their businesses so prospects can find them and evaluate what they offer. That means making available through websites, business directories and business networking platforms all their details.
Contacts at companies also advertise their details. Some purely because of business reasons, e.g. there are public relations contacts, support contacts, account directors, board members, leadership teams, etc. But many others advertise themselves on LinkedIn or similar professional networking sites.
Most are on LinkedIn to help find better jobs and manage their career, others use the networking site to find prospects, and that’s where B2B contact research is very useful. LinkedIn themselves provide tools to research their network, hence most members know they are likely to be researched, and that’s ok because it’s a business networking platform.
Hence, B2B data is widely available for free on the web. For B2C data that’s not the case. Using more consumer friendly social networks like Facebook is important. Although contact details aren’t readily available, Facebook advertising and building communities is the best way to build a permission based consumer database.
So, what are the cons?
Some clients buy data from B2B data suppliers. The data supplier will often use Companies House data to identify businesses, but many of these businesses, although active, are one-person outfits or non-trading entities or investment vehicles, etc.
These types of companies may not have a website, may not have many contacts associated with them. So, finding contacts details like switchboard numbers or trading addresses may not be available.
If you’ve purchased data like these companies then your data set is effectively reduced as there are no meaningful contacts. Unfortunately, I seen many companies purchase data sets where a large number these types of companies are present and shouldn’t really be sold as potential marketing targets.
Most B2B contact details can be found, however, emails are less likely to be found on the web, but you can call the company and in about 1 in 6 cases they do tend to give you their email address. You can clearly infer an email address and test it, but make sure you have some connection with that person before you email them as data protection requires permission (there are exceptions to this rule which are named as ‘soft-opt-ins’, see https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/marketing/ for more information.)
One or two clients have asked for direct dials to be research, but it is very rare that such phone numbers are available. Only switchboard numbers are on the web.
Summary
B2B data research is very valuable, far more so than purchasing data and should be considered a must spend before any sustained marketing campaigns. The ROI is most cases is always very positive.
The research can be either to validate your own data to make it current or it could for a new set of organisations you identified or for a new type of contact within the existing customer base. Whatever the purpose, B2B web research produces far better data sets.