What one thing can improve the success of your campaign? Targeting the right audience. Slicing and dicing who will receive your content, and is most likely to respond to it, will boost your results.
You and your colleagues have spent a lot of time and effort gathering the information in your database. But if you can’t reliably segment your data; how valuable is it? You need to be able to leverage the information you have about your contacts to build your audience segment. We’ve defined several different approaches to help uniformly group your data.
- Picklists
Picklists in your CRM and MA instance help keep the data for fields like country, state, and industry consistent. Take advantage of two-letter abbreviations for state/province or country fields.
Does your company target specific industries like Education or Healthcare? If so, create dropdown picklists in your CRM and corresponding picklists in your MA instance for industry. Healthcare is a broad category; consider breaking it down one more level such as into Hospital, Nursing Home, or Physician’s Office. Same with Education: if appropriate, distinguish between K-12 and Higher Ed, or even into grade levels if that is relevant to your products.
- Data Normalization
Your database has leads and contacts from a variety of different sources. Making sense of all this data requires reliable ways to categorize it. One approach is to “normalize” the data into categories such as job title, job function, country or state.
A data normalization program will evaluate your data and assign a standardized value for these fields that can be leveraged for segmentation.
- Shared Lists
Shared lists are a great way to determine what interests your contacts. Utilizing the “Add to Shared List” processing step is an easy way to group contacts based on submitting a specific form. When you’re uploading lists from an external event, add them to a shared list that is unique for attendees of the event.
Later when you are building your campaign audience based on specific content, simply add the appropriate shared lists to your audience segment. Previous activity can help you determine the best audience for your campaign.
- Database Cleanup
Clean up your database every six months by looking at non-responders. Let’s be honest: if they aren’t responding, they probably aren’t interested in your product or services, so they’re just taking up space in your database.
But, before just deleting these contacts, consider conducting a “We want you back” campaign. Give your contacts an opportunity to keep receiving your message. If they don’t respond, it’s probably time to part ways.
By implementing all or some of the approaches identified above, you’ll be well on your way to campaign success. Whichever approach you choose, remember to educate your sales and marketing colleagues on the importance of accurately recording this key information to improve overall campaign success.
Don’t know where to get started? DemandGen is here to help you find the best approach for you and your team. Contact your DemandGen Account Director or give us a shout.
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Angela Brock is an Account Director at DemandGen. She works directly with clients to help advance their business needs, develop long-range marketing plans, and drive ongoing success with their marketing initiatives. Angela is Marketo Certified and she is an Eloqua Product and RPM Master.
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