Diary of a Marketing Insight Guy

Ardent readers of Database Marketing magazine may have spotted my letter regarding data acquisition published in the June issue and I thought it worthwhile expanding on the topic here. I had written in response to an article in the May issue concerning the availability of business universe databases, such as Thompson Local or Corpdata. I made the  point that whilst the focus always appears to be on the number of companies available in such databases, be it 1.8 million records at Thompson Local or Corpdata’s 1.2 million, less attention is paid to the availability of individual contact names.

Establishing the businesses that exist within the UK (or elsewhere), particularly at the medium/large end of the spectrum, is relatively straightforward. Incorporated companies in the UK are registered with Companies House, whilst in France all trading entities must register with the authorities. This data is a matter of record, and the suppliers mentioned above aggregate and enhance it to create business universes which can be rented or purchased. Identifying smaller business can certainly be more challenging, although databases such as Information Arts‘ Business DNA in the UK do exist.

At the larger-organisation end of the spectrum though, databases and lists are invariably made available with contact names consisting of the “officers” of the company (directors registered with Companies House in the UK for instance) and perhaps other senior executives. Other data sources have more specific contact names among IT, finance or marketing decision makers, and specialist lists (particularly publishers’) may enable selection from a wide range of job functions and responsibilities.

However, these selections frequently do not go far enough in terms of their granularity, and tend to offer merely “key decision makers” or “most senior decision maker”, which are usually hopeless. I’ve been involved in activity recently involving IT decision makers with responsibility for “application infrastructure” or a specific and somewhat obscure software platform, to whom we were promoting high end enterprise software solutions. When list suppliers contact me trying to sell their database of “4 million UK companies with named IT managers”, I’m underwhelmed.

My message to data owners then is, make sure you understand your target market’s requirements and don’t try offering generic lists when more specific data is required. Trying to impress potential customers with big numbers based on the count of companies in your database will backfire, and suggesting inappropriate contact roles will destroy your credibility.

Equally, if you’re procuring data, don’t be taken in by claims of database size and how many contacts you are being offered. Dig into the detail and ask what size the organisations are, what is the seniority of the contacts and what are the specifics of their roles. Don’t despair however, as even if pre-built lists or existing databases don’t exist, there are cost effective methods of building databases to your requirements.

This is the message for data users though: if you want quality data, you must accept that there is a cost associated, and it may not be instantly available either. An investment of time and money though, along with strong creative and proposition, will be rewarded.

Having undertaken a conference delegate propensity modelling exercise recently, the next step was to source external data matching the necessary profile. This meant more than simply looking for “lists” of magazine subscribers or other trade show attendees. Instead it involved applying a more granular filter on as wide a universe of senior IT contacts as possible. The delegate profile is based on job title, organisation size and location, so we needed to be able to select across these criteria. Since our data requirements are ongoing though, due to the year round conference calendar, we also needed a source of constantly refreshed data, not simply one-off lists for each campaign. Finally, it’s crucial that we are able to take possession of the data itself in order to be able to perform our own campaign execution, as opposed to the data owner conducting it on our behalf.

Mardev have a range of useful sources, but tend to fall into the “list” category and also usually insist on undertaking campaigns on a proxy basis. This isn’t an invalid approach in terms of database creation, but our creative, execution, tracking and response mechanisms are tuned to being able to undertake campaign activity ourselves. Harte Hanks’ [link] European-wide IT contact database, which they proactively maintain via telephone updates and other research, is closer to our requirements. However, they didn’t quite seem flexible enough for us in terms of selections and data delivery, which would have made life difficult from a workflow point of view. In the end, we’ve settled on Proactive Marketing, who have built and maintain a similar, actively updated IT contact database. The have a comprehensive job function schema which allows us to make selections based on our profile, as well as the usual industry and organisation size classifications. Proactive also provide a very straightforward web interface in order to query and download data on an ad hoc basis.

The plan now is to “operationalise” the Proactive data feed, to fit it into our regular data management processes. This means receiving a regular (probably monthly) set of updates from them, with all new and amended data, tagged with interest areas to match our delegate profiles. The trick, as always with such feeds, is managing the changes in data between each update, ensuring the amendments are applied but that nothing else is lost, tracking the relevant interests and ensuring that old data is removed.

So far, the results have been very encouraging, with “new” contacts registering for events as a result of having been included in campaign activity. As ongoing activity builds familiarity with the brand and offering, we’re confidant that response will increase over time.