Lead generation and nurturing powered by data for edge computing and data center marketing

The Stumbling Blocks of Lead Nurturing

Increasing customer acquisition is the top priority for most marketing teams. Over the past year, more aggressive approaches to lead nurturing have swelled. Fifty-five percent of marketing departments have increased lead generation activity, and 78 percent say those budgets will grow or rise. Online marketing efforts have seen a steep rise, and it’s increased importance appears here to stay.

Despite the surge, the hurdles when finding online lead generation confidence are many. Am I finding real decision makers and influencers? Are they sales-ready? Are they a fit for our services? Do they have the budget? Do I even have their contact information? All edge companies and data center operators are looking for digital ways to better know their clients, reach a wider audience and provide relevant information – do the answers lie in the data?

Though there aren’t any easy answers, sticking close to data is your best bet for increasing productivity, strengthening ROI and shortening sales cycles. Properly obtaining and utilizing good data offers real-time insight into your prospects’ evolving needs, and provides a platform for creating strategies to connect with quality leads.

Here’s How: Relevant Messaging

Engaging all leads with the same messaging isn’t effective, and data is vital to knowing how to differentiate. When reaching out, ensure your communication is personalized and specific by analyzing existing data to uncover insights on what may have previously prompted high engagement such as content format, keywords and even time of day of your messaging. Buyer journey maps and account-based marketing approaches are elevated when founded on focused customer data. Search engine ads, social media ads, email marketing, content marketing pieces – your campaigns can focus in with pinpoint accuracy to maximize ROI while creating more data to use in targeting lookalike audiences next time. While this may seem like the most prominent use of data in transforming contacts to customers, there are other, less distinct places where data needs to enter your processes, too.

Use Reliable Data to Draw Useful Leads

Data-driven outreach efforts can make impressive improvements to the top of your sales funnel. Improving your lead generation process starts with identifying the best channels, ones that can bore towards the right leads for you. It takes some experimentation with different tools and technologies to find the right channels, but prioritizing data can help. First, you can prioritize data by using it to target your ideal audience. For instance, you could leverage intent data – information about a company’s online employee activity – to mark which organizations are already showing interest in your services by searching for it or even visiting your website. Or, you could tap into backend LinkedIn profile data to find opportunities to strike up conversations with the people most likely to be interested in your offerings.

A second way data can help is by assessing the data generated by your outreach channel experimentation. Knowing which channels are producing which types of prospects creates the opportunity to focus marketing efforts – and dollars – on the touch points that matter most. For example, virtual events are a great way to increase your network, but you can also use the information gathered from attendees to identify possible leads if you are willing and ready to analyze the data. Even for channels you already employ, there are valuable means of analyzing data in a way that can generate more leads for your business. What do you do with data collected for your website traffic, chatbot or social media engagement? With the right analytics and CRM integration you can present data that identifies trends and behaviour that can help you remove friction from the buying process.

Learn From Your Contact Database

While filling the top of your sales funnel is about quantity, further down the pipeline it’s about quality. To ensure quality leads, you first need to have reliable data regarding who you are trying to reach. Luckily, there is a stockpile of information about your target audience: your contact database. Use the data you’ve gathered over the years to better understand your audience and their needs. Even by isolating straightforward attributes like job position, industry and location, slicing and dicing the data makes you smarter at qualifying relevant leads. This is because better understanding consumer behaviour and preferences means the ability to predict it more effectively in the future. The more you work with your database, the better you’ll be at tailoring your business to certain audiences.

Of course, your company database goldmine is only useful if it’s structured, current and unified. For many organizations this is a huge step. The records you keep concerning customers, prospects, marketing and sales should be synchronized and consistent, not scattered or littered with redundancies and inconsistencies.

Once your database is accurate and updated, you can start looking for lead characteristics by segmenting and categorizing audiences. You can let the data lead by combing through your lists and grouping according to common traits, using the analysis to create personas of ideal prospects. Or, you can generate your own list of perceived customer preferences, interests, goals and challenges, and use the data to test your hypotheses by segmenting the lists to see how they match.

At the surface, the value of leaning on your databases seems clear: by better understanding your prospects you can better address their pain points, answer their questions and keep them engaged. The deeper benefit to your sales cycle, though, lies in better equipping yourself to identify which leads will buy once they enter your funnel. Tracking and examining customers and their journeys is the only way to identify the patterns that make your efforts to convert new leads more tactically sound.

Putting It All Together

It can be intimidating to look at fusing data-driven inputs into your practices and ensuring data-backed choices for outbound communication. Overall, though, it may be more difficult not to take an approach that maximizes data use: knowing that your lead generation plan relies on a data-driven direction gives confidence. Not only does this mindset empower your tools and enhance your processes, but even if the plan fails you have a way of identifying where and why – a roadmap for constant improvement. You’ve already got the workshop, why not make sure all your marketing machinery is in tip top shape?

About the author

Jaymie Scotto Cutaia is CEO and founder of Jaymie Scotto & Associates (JSA). JSA is a provider of public relations, marketing and event services to companies in the telecom, data center and tech sectors.

DISCLAIMER: Guest posts are submitted content. The views expressed in this blog are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of Edge Industry Review (EdgeIR.com).

Article Topics

customers  |  edge cloud  |  edge data center  |  edge ecosystem  |  lead generation  |  marketing