Tuesday, September 13, 2005
One Free Tool For Better Prospect Lists: The Flip Side of Marketing Measurement
Sometimes in the quest for improving our techniques for measuring marketing effectiveness, it’s easy to forget that without a good prospect database any marketing initiative is dead in the water. MROI, MRM, Marketing Dashboards; these are the things that have received all the focus and glory in recent years while the decidedly unsexy side of the equation — data cleansing and database maintenance is the poor cousin toiling in obscurity.
In case you can’t tell, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately doing marketing database upkeep and one of the persistent problems I’ve found with bought lists from publications, and to a lesser degree prospect lists obtained from event organizers, is that people lie. Maybe it’s because they want to feel more important when they register for a conference, or sometimes they just don’t want to supply the information asked of them, but don’t they think I know there is only one CEO of Pfizer?
The more difficult problem in keeping a clean database is when a prospect does not supply a business address for mail delivery. Maybe they like receiving work mail at home, but for Business-to-Business mailings I don’t like sending stuff there. To combat this, I recently discovered a new tool: Google Maps . Mapquest has been around for a long time, but what I like better about Google Maps is the combination of illustrated map lookups with an overlaid satellite photo. Type in that suspect mailing address, zoom down as close as you can and see if that’s a residential or business address. Hmmm…no large parking lot…and is that a pool? Let’s fix that record and send the mailer to the company address instead. For fun, click and drag on the map and you can scroll around the area too.
It’s not a perfect tool, especially if there are many records to reconcile and there might be some reasons to send a piece to a prospect’s home, but in a B2B environment I can’t think of one. It’s at least one small step towards cultivating better prospect target lists — and getting better results (leads) to measure on the other side of the process and isn’t that what it’s all about?
In case you can’t tell, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately doing marketing database upkeep and one of the persistent problems I’ve found with bought lists from publications, and to a lesser degree prospect lists obtained from event organizers, is that people lie. Maybe it’s because they want to feel more important when they register for a conference, or sometimes they just don’t want to supply the information asked of them, but don’t they think I know there is only one CEO of Pfizer?
The more difficult problem in keeping a clean database is when a prospect does not supply a business address for mail delivery. Maybe they like receiving work mail at home, but for Business-to-Business mailings I don’t like sending stuff there. To combat this, I recently discovered a new tool: Google Maps . Mapquest has been around for a long time, but what I like better about Google Maps is the combination of illustrated map lookups with an overlaid satellite photo. Type in that suspect mailing address, zoom down as close as you can and see if that’s a residential or business address. Hmmm…no large parking lot…and is that a pool? Let’s fix that record and send the mailer to the company address instead. For fun, click and drag on the map and you can scroll around the area too.
It’s not a perfect tool, especially if there are many records to reconcile and there might be some reasons to send a piece to a prospect’s home, but in a B2B environment I can’t think of one. It’s at least one small step towards cultivating better prospect target lists — and getting better results (leads) to measure on the other side of the process and isn’t that what it’s all about?
