There is a natural sequence to most of the activities we engage in on a daily basis. Every day is a series of steps leading to an endless amount of completed projects that combine to create what is our life. If you are hungry and need a meal, you find a recipe, shop for ingredients, cook, then eat. If your kids need new clothes, you find their size, their desired style, you shop, they wear the clothes… Job done.
Think for a second on this. What if any of the above sequences were completed out of order? Or worse, what if a step was neglected entirely? If you didn’t use inherent logic to feed yourself or clothe your kids, what would happen? If you were starving for chicken, and you found a great recipe, bought the ingredients, then ate… You skipped the cooking part. Boom food poisoning! What if your son little Johnnie needed new clothes? You went right to the store, got some cool new threads that you think the little bugger would like and you buy them… You skipped the measurement step. Instead of being the coolest kid in school, little Johnnie now has flood pants and shirts that are too big… Boom recess wedgie!
Attention to sequence and logic is every bit as important when setting up an outbound/inbound marketing campaign. Ideal profile, tactical messaging, data work, execution, analysis: Those are the 5 steps every marketer goes through to get a successful campaign up and out the door. For the most part, our clients do a great job of hitting all five in order. After some informal research, we’ve found that the most neglected and often skipped step is the data management one. Marketing automaton is working, and our clients have larger and larger databases under management as a result. The issue then becomes the fact that these same marketers are not database admins by trade yet are expected to be so. Often it is assumed that the data is great and targeted because it’s “inbound.” This false confidence results in the data work step getting ignored at the marketer’s peril.
We find that our clients’ internally generated data is some of the worst. For that reason, when we get a database from a client we immediately run it through a Netprospex data health scan. It’s a free tool that will not only give you a data quality overview, but will show you a full demographic summary of your data. You’ll know not only how good the data is, but you’ll also know whether or not you are targeting the right companies and people. When armed with this information, you can start to put your data to work for you.
Let’s get back to our natural sequence concept with the assumption that you skip the data management step and just assume your internal list is perfect. What happens? It’s very unlikely you’ll get food poisoning or a wedgie, but you will certainly increase the chance your campaign will fail. It’s a risk not worth taking.
Stick to the sequence above and pay special attention to your data. It’s not as good as you think. Give it a sanity check before you move to the next step. It’s the most often skipped step by B2B marketers. Make little Johnnie cool and pay attention to it.
