Content and data are two critical components of any successful email marketing campaign.
Without relevant, quality content, you won’t influence your audience to do what you want them to do –such as make an enquiry, book a consultation or buy your product. And without the right data even theworld’s best content will fall on deaf ears.
So, both matter. A lot.
Let’s look into this some more and explore what else you can do to get the most from your marketing campaigns.
Define your target audience
First of all you need to understand in detail who you’re trying to reach with your campaign. Not just which type ofcompanies, but also the individuals within those companies. Once you know the sector and the job title you needto create your key messaging around how you solve the problems of the company AND the individual.
Create content that will resonate
If your content doesn’t resonate with the individual you won’t get any further than that. Remember, as much assome products can be game-changing for companies, they can also cause headaches for the individuals who willbe using them. You need to show how you make your target individual’s life better or their job easier in addition tothe core benefits. Your first piece of content has to grab the attention of the right people in the right way.
Get your data
That’s where data comes in. You could have defined your audience, perfected your message, and createdcompelling content around it, but you now need to make sure your audience actually gets the message. You needto target them directly, not just hope they see your social media posts or find you via Google search.
You need reliable, legal and effective B2B data (https://www.i4b.com/). And it has to be the right B2B data, don’tjust send it to your contacts because that’s what’s in front of you. It’s important to invest in the B2B data that youneed and then use it to conduct email marketing campaigns, direct mail campaigns and telemarketing campaigns.
Compelling content coupled with effective data will yield results.
Adopt a multi-channel approach
You need to market across multiple channels to give you the best chance of success. Again, you need to get yourcontent in front of your target audience, and by all means possible.
Support your direct marketing campaigns by using all available channels, such as all relevant social mediaplatforms and your website’s blog.
Change up your content
Every platform/channel requires you to vary your content so that it’s optimised for each platform. You also need touse different types of content to keep your audience engaged. Be creative with how you use written word, images,audio and video. Remember to make sure you’ve always got your audience in mind and you’re not just creatingcontent that you want to make.
When running email marketing campaigns try changing the format between plain text and HTML to see what getsthe best traction.
Remember, it’s all about results
A lot of businesses make the mistake of focusing too narrowly on perfecting their content and not putting enoughresource into defining their target audience and acquiring the data needed to actually reach the right people.
Sadly award-winning content doesn’t necessarily equate to increased revenues or a successful campaign.
As we’ve said, getting the creative right is of course important, but you only make your money if the right peoplesee it.
So, what’s more important, content or data?
The honest answer is that both are extremely important if you want to drive engagement, grow your pipeline andboost sales.
Data however is what’s going to make the difference to your success. Only data can generate results for you, sothat has to be your primary focus and where you invest most of your budget.
That’s because if you send average content to the right people you can still generate prospects, customers andnew revenues. But if you send well-crafted content to the wrong people you won’t get anything from the campaign.
For example, you wouldn’t create the world’s greatest lawnmower and go door-to-door selling in a block of flatsbecause obviously you wouldn’t sell any lawnmowers there. Yet if you created an average lawnmower some peoplewith lawns would still buy it. That’s why your audience and therefore your data, is more important than yourcontent.
So don’t neglect data if you want any of your future marketing campaigns to have maximum impact. There are nowlots of B2B data providers out there – we’ve been around for over 25 years now so we’ve seem them all come andgo! To help you choose the best B2B data provider to meet your specific needs we’ve compiled a handy guide to the questions you should ask as well as acomprehensive competitor comparison for some ofthe big names.
Talk to us at i-4business to find out how we can help you get the best email data necessary for your business.
Call us on 01252 367400 or email support@i4b.com
