Blogs
Databases: are you hiding behind the numbers?
When you have 10,000 people on your database, it’s easy to make marketing look like it’s delivering, even when it’s not; with a 1% response to emails, you still have 100 people clicking.
But what happens when you have a database of only five companies, each with 10 contacts, that’s 50 people in total? Now there’s nowhere to hide.
We have clients like this. They have one major customer and this year, they want to win one more, because that one contract may be worth as much as £3million. So we are both playing for high stakes.
Here, email marketing doesn’t work at all; these are very senior people who either do not read all sales email, or have someone who can delete it for them.
LinkedIn and Twitter may reach them, but possibly not. PR we think definitely does, but we won’t find out until they engage and we have done our job of delivering a qualified sales opportunity and moved into pre-sales.
I’m not giving away our secret for getting a meaningful response from some of these prospects, but I will say that typical mass marketing doesn’t work. It has a role in terms of raising company profile and maintaining communications with existing customers, but we are pursuing a highly personalised approach to these key prospects, using techniques that utilise familiar channels but unfamiliar content.
Which brings me back as ever (I’m an ex-journalist) to the story; what are you saying that your audience might actually give a damn about, to pause for a second or stop for long enough to express their interest?
It’s not easy, and there are a lot of clever people out there competing for the interest of the same people you are targeting. You know your retailer database. Now can you catch their eye?
