B2B Marketing: How Big Should Your Marketing Database Be?

How many names—and which names—should you buy for your marketing database?  I wish more marketers would be more strategic, asking themselves questions like these about their data needs. When management is pushing for  more results and faster results, it’s tempting to just pick up the phone and work with the first data provider that comes your way, with minimum or no specs.  But then, you find yourself with loads of data— probably half of which is outside of your target market—but still no data strategy or revenue targets. And you wonder why your conversion rates are so low. If additionally, you invested in a data cleansing tool-—which I highly recommend—you find yourself paying for cleaning and updating useless records.

This kind of shotgun approach to list buying is both rarely effective and very expensive.  But data and analytics do not have to be hard.

A) First, evaluate your data needs properly

• know what revenue target your marketing team signed up for;
  
• know your target geos, industries, company size segments, and personas;
  
• know your average outbound conversion rates;
  
• then reverse engineer by subtracting your forecasted inbound leads—and “voila”.

B) Next, using your existing database, count only the records that were engaged with you in the last year and whose target segment (geo, industry, company size, personas) matches your own.

The gap between what you need (A) and what you have (B) tells  you (C) how much you need to purchase.

As simple as 1+1 = 2,  Total Data Needs – Existing Relevant Data = Data to Purchase.  

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