Looking to build a qualified marketing leads database? Here are the steps that you should take:
- Target Market Criteria: Choose the industry and sub-industry you are trying to target. If you want to develop a marketing leads database or business contact list for multiple industries, target them one by one. Do not attempt to cover all of them in one go.
- Company Criteria: Define the broad criteria that will help you identify the companies within the chosen industry by revenue, geography, employee size, etc. Example: Software product companies with a revenue range of $100 – $500 million located in North America.
- Select Companies: Search, download, or copy and paste the list of companies from free internet resources like:
- https://www.manta.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/
- https://www.thomasnet.com/
- https://dir.yahoo.com/business_and_economy/directories/companies/
- https://www.google.com/Top/Business/
- Define functional role: Identify in what division, or department, of the organization your target contact is likely to be located. Ex/ IT, Human Resource, Marketing, Manufacturing.
- Level: Define what level of decision maker, user or influencer you intend to target. Like VP of Marketing, Director of IT, or CFO
- Format: Make an excel format for data capture. Write all data attributes you want to capture like Name, Mailing address, Phone number, Email address etc. It is a good idea to check the import format of the CRM or any other marketing automation tool you are using. This will help you to easily import the marketing leads database or business contact list file to your CRM, contact management application, or email marketing platform.
- Start the internet based research in the following order of preference:
- Company website: See if the name of the contact is listed in the management team, “About Us”, or “History” section of the website. Even if you do not get the contact, pick up any data attribute like phone number, mailing address, etc and populate it in the excel spreadsheet.
- Check https://www.linkedin.com/ by visiting the respective company information section
- Check https://www.jigsaw.com/. You need not have an account or pay to look up information. Capture whatever relevant information you can from the free look-up.
- Check any of your industry specific free resources
- Refine the above search process as you go and note the time you are spending on the search. Try to limit it to around10-12 companies or contacts per hour. This will help you budget the time you need for building a marketing leads database or business contact list, and also avoid endless searches. You can now back calculate to see if you can do that individually or need more resources to build the business contact database. Example: Your goal is to build a database of 1000 contacts and your research is producing 10 contacts per hour, you know you will need 100 hours of research.
- Validate: The marketing leads database or business contact list you have made so far is very relevant to your business, but is not validated. Now you need to call the companies to verify that the contacts still work for that company, and that they are in the same role within the company. Remember, you are not selling and marketing at this stage, just verifying the accuracy and the relevance of the marketing leads database or business contact list.
Once you are satisfied with the overall quality of your qualified leads marketing leads database or business contact list, you can then hand it over to you sales and or marketing team.
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