Gina Goanta, Chief Data Officer, Anteriad
Data enrichment is an often-overlooked area of B2B marketing strategy. But why? It’s time consuming and doesn’t give the adrenalin hits of getting straight out in the market. But without it your marketing, business development and sales teams will really miss out.
Enriched data can give you:
- Better content to really provide value to your prospects
- A strong pipeline of prospects to nurture over time
- Better qualified leads within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Higher value customers with strong renewal potential
What is data enrichment?
Depending on the dataset you’re starting out with, it simply means adding additional data to your list of key accounts that will support your efforts from the prospecting stage through to sale.
- Firmographics – key data about the company (HQs, company size, revenue, internal decision-making structures etc.)
- Technographics – what technologies your key accounts already have in place, when they were purchased, when they anticipate renewal etc.
- Intent – what signals key accounts are giving to indicate they are in-market
- Contact details – who is on the buying committee and how to reach them
- Custom information – depending on your product / service there may be specific things you need to know e.g., the number of invoices processed each year, number of potential users, what servers they use, and so on.
Best practices for data enrichment
- Focus on actionable insights – it’s tempting to flood the database with everything you can find, but often it makes it hard for marketing and sales to wade through. Think about what data will add qualifying insights to help them take action or make decisions, then focus your efforts there.
- Continuous improvement – too many people take a “once and done” approach, but we know that data can age pretty quickly. As well as keeping contact information and account structures up-to-date, you’d miss out on quick wins if you fail to stay on top of buying signals for your key accounts. Make sure you factor in some element of ongoing maintenance into any enrichment program.
- Respect data privacy – it should go without saying, but collecting personal data (especially contact information) can be problematic. If you’re going to include this in the database, be sure to give all of your users the right training to use data in a compliant way.
How we can help with data enrichment
- Defining customer profile – our data analysts can help you study your sales data to define your Ideal Customer Profile. This could include the best industry verticals or best job functions to target, identifying what size or scale a company would need to take advantage of your product, or even understanding which segments or accounts have strong renewal potential.
- Multiple third-party data sources – we leverage multiple data sources to ensure that we can enrich with the most recent, relevant, and reliable data for your organization’s specific objectives. We have access to over 81 million contacts globally, covering all industries across 90+ countries. Our third-party sources provide firmographics, technographics and intent.
- Custom first-party data – our team of 10 researchers generate our own first-party custom data, supported by proprietary AI. We can also activate our huge native-language call centre capability to generate opt-ins or even to qualify all the way through to BANT/SQL level.
- Ongoing enrichment – this can be tricky to deliver in-house because it requires many different skillsets at different stages. We have analysts, architects, strategists, developers and researchers, so you can access the right specialisms as and when you need them.
- Compliance with global data regulations – our whole business is driven by data, so best-practice compliance is absolutely essential for us. Led by our DPO Maxim Olivier, we’re always up to date with the latest developments worldwide – whether GDPR, California, Australia or other jurisdictions.