Business today relies on data to inform all aspects of operations. It used to be that only large companies with huge budgets could access the level of data needed to optimize. Modern tech has made it possible for any business to access powerful data.
Thanks to this increased access, intelligent business development teams turn to a data-driven business development strategy. That means integrating data into every aspect, especially sales and marketing. The more data you can gather and analyze, the better decisions you can make regarding your products, services, and most effective marketing approach.
Data Tools and Applications
When it comes to your business development strategy, data can be used to:
- Optimize marketing
- Improve customer acquisition and retention
- Identify new opportunities
There are a few essential tools your business can leverage to gain and effectively process data. Some of the top include:
1) Market research
Though market research is not a physical tool, it is a powerful process to have in your data toolbox. With market research, you can confirm or update your hypothesis about your industry and gain information about new industry segments you plan to break into. Use your market research information to shape your outreach strategy and optimize your products and services to meet emerging needs.
The market research process requires mining data to help understand trends in your industry, changes in preferences, and other valuable insights. For most small to mid-sized businesses, it’s advantageous to outsource market research for better quality.
With all that data in one place, you can understand what’s working and what’s not in marketing outreach. And, you can use your marketing automation system to make changes based on the feedback it receives, like updating when messages are sent or sending a redrop or new message based on the recipient’s interactions. Data like dates of last message, upcoming renewal dates, and date of last messaging engagement are just a few meaningful data points marketing automation used to improve outreach performance.
2) Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is your data gathering nexus. It connects all your outreach methods and gives you a centralized data location. Pulling from your email and social media outreach, website, and text campaigns, it’s the one-stop-shop to see what resonates with your prospects and customers.
With all that data in one place, you can understand what’s working and what’s not in marketing outreach. And, you can use your marketing automation system to make changes based on the feedback it receives, like updating when messages are sent or sending a redrop or new message based on the recipient’s interactions. Data like dates of last message, upcoming renewal dates, and date of last messaging engagement are just a few meaningful data points marketing automation used to improve outreach performance.
Valuable Data Points to Collect
- Behaviors on the website
- Content the user interacted with
- Forms they filled out
- How long they viewed certain important pages
- Downloaded assets
- Event registrations
- Even (aggregate) heat maps to show page interaction
- Purchases
- Email behaviors (opens, click throughs, responses)
- Social media behaviors
- Ad interactions
3) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool
It’s no surprise that your CRM is an essential data management tool. When properly supplied with data, your CRM tells you all you need to know about your customers, their likes and dislikes, what they need, and how they like to get in touch. Leverage your CRM to create targeted groupings based on factors like location, company size, or industry to create targeted messaging that speaks to each grouping’s needs.
The best way to get quality data into your CRM is to integrate it with your marketing automation system. You can pull vital elements from your marketing automation like what pieces of content interest each customer or prospect the most or how ready they are to buy based on their marketing interactions (i.e., visited pricing page, watched a demo, reopened an email).
Ways to Integrate Data into Outreach
Outreach that works is an integral part of your business development strategy. You can significantly increase your outreach efficacy with data, increasing engagement and conversion.
To create such effective outreach, you need to start by diversifying your messaging based on prospect and customer segments. Personalization is an expectation these days, and generic messaging or messaging that doesn’t speak directly to a recipient’s individual needs will turn them away almost instantly. Use your CRM data to segment your audiences and send targeted messaging through marketing automation to get your outreach heard.
A final part of creating good outreach is setting up a data loop to ensure your messaging stays relevant. Once your messaging is sent, you need a way to bring data in about how it was received. From there, you need a dedicated team to analyze that data and report back on necessary changes. As you can see, data tools are helpful in managing the large amounts of information you need, but you still need people to analyze and process changes.
The Right People for the Job
If your business needs to improve its data management and business development outreach, the experts at NuGrowth Solutions can help. With a decade of experience, our team leverages data to understand trends, identify key audiences, and target outreach. We know the value in sales and marketing data integration and employ a data feedback loop that’s critical to success.
We guarantee we’ll increase your outreach engagement with our experienced team and top-of-the-line data tools. Get in touch to meet with us and start your data-driven business development strategy today.