In a recent article we discussed the 10 most common lead generation mistakes. At number 3 was not collecting the right information. In this post we explore the right information to collect in your lead generation B2B marketing campaigns.
Firstly you need to know what information you want to hold on your leads, where this information is available from and then decide what information you need to capture from your website.
Plenty of the information will be available either publicly or on a paid for basis. The chances are that it will be easier and more cost effective to build up a lot of this information prior to requesting the information from leads on your website.
If you already have the data, you can use your website lead capture to verify data and collect data that you can't obtain elsewhere.
Ideally you want to keep your website data submission forms short, making them more likely to be completed.
The information you are likely to need in your B2B marketing campaigns
The basics
- Contact name
- Job role
- Email address
- Phone number
- Company name
- Website
- Address
A lot of this data you will want to capture in your lead generation process. Some of it can be purchased, but contact names, job roles and email addresses are often out of date, so you'll want to capture these directly.
Buying characteristics
- Buying characteristics such as products, quantities, frequency
- Buying process
- Decision-making units
- Buying cycle position
- Buying journey position
This is an important part of your lead generation campaign that will help you build a much deeper understand of customer fit and their likelihood to buy in the near future. You'll need to capture this data as part of your marketing cycle as you won't be able to buy it in.
Current position and challenges
- Response and interaction characteristics
- Promotions responses, what's been sent and how they've responded
- Enquiries - what about?
Understanding your buyers' position and challenges will help to tailor your marketing messages to the value they are looking for from your product or service. Understanding and using this will help you improve your conversion rate of leads.
Area characteristics
- Area characteristics
- Business sectors
This information is useful in targeting your marketing messages appropriately, with sector specific features, benefits and case studies. It can also be used in reporting to understand how different sectors and regions are performing.
Competitor information
More often than not competitor information is going to need to be developed behind the scenes, to help you develop a more detailed picture of your customers' business landscapes.
Financial data
- Turn-over and financial data
- Year-end data
This data can either be captured as part of your marketing campaign, or purchased and appended to your data. For UK based B2B marketing campaigns the data is available from Companies House.
Business characteristics
- Number of employees
- Sites
- Computers
- Vehicles
Number of employees can be purchased, but it is likely that the rest of the data will need to be captured as part of your marketing campaign. The data that you want to capture in this section will depend on what is relevant to the product or service that you are marketing.
In B2B marketing and higher value B2C sales it is important that you develop an understanding the complexity of the decision making unit (DMU).
The other critical element to gain a deeper understanding of is the buying cycle of the product or service you are selling and the customers position on that buying cycle.
If you have the aim of gathering data at every opportunity and use tools like progressive profiling to help you with this, you'll quickly start to build a much deeper and more accurate profile of your customers that will net dividends in the returns generated from your B2B marketing campaigns.
