Why a marketing database is essential for your small business
Small businesses face many challenges when it comes to selling their goods and services. One is the need to ensure they gather and store the right information about their customers so they can market their products to their target audience effectively. When it comes to small businesses, most owners don’t prioritize creating a marketing database for their daily operations. They believe it will be too costly for them now and in the long run. Besides, where do you start?
Most people associate marketing databases with bigger companies. But the truth is that small businesses can also utilized the benefits of a marketing database to reach out to customers. There are many database types and architectures that you can choose from to increase sales conversions and improve customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction leads to a better reputation. With the help of a marketing database you can develop your small business to grow consistently and enjoy a competitive edge in the market – especially if your competitors don’t manage their CRM (Customer relationship management) software very effectively, or at all.
7 reasons why your small business needs a marketing database today
Marketing databases are not confined to big companies. Small and emerging businesses can enjoy the benefits of a marketing database to reach their target audience. The database contains names, email, LinkedIn profiles, and much more about every lead that has come to your site. The database is often part of a larger sales management system or automated marketing system (or both, as in the case of companies like Hubspot). Business owners who already use a marketing database for their small enterprises have discovered they can be a massive game-changer.
But what can a marketing database do for your small business? Here are seven key reasons why you should start using a marketing database for your small business today if you aren’t already.
- Gain insight into your customers’ lives
- Offer heightened personalization
- Establish loyalty
- Spend funds wisely
- Utilize business resources wisely
- Increase available information and data
- Identify your next marketing opportunity
Gain insight into your customers’ lives
Thanks to a marketing database, your customers will no longer be strangers to you. It’s almost creepy how much information can be amassed and stored about prospective or actual customers. This data and information is an invaluable resource to learn about:
- Your customers’ likes and dislikes
- Their wants and needs
- Their socio-economic level
- Key demographic details
This collective information helps you in a big way to sell the right products to the correct targeted audience. You can increase lead conversions and enjoy higher ROI (Return on Investment), while being better able to predict their communication responses and needs in the future.
It can also help you track your sales, up-sell, and improve business reputation by engaging prospects and customers with lead nurturing as part of a broader strategy. And no, you don’t need a huge team to do it.
Offer heightened personalization
Once you’ve met your business prospects – even virtually via your website, you can offer personalized service at an entirely new level. Your database will help you determine the most effective channel for outreach. Additionally, you can create segmented lists for better promotional emails or text messages. When your business speaks to your target audience, you can find a surge in response rates and customer interaction, which helps you build customer loyalty and retention.
Establish loyalty
As mentioned in the previous point, customer loyalty is an integral part of your business. Customer loyalty improves business reputation via better reviews, testimonials, and word-of-mouth referrals. If you can offer the right message to the your customers at the correct time, you will invoke a brand following that fosters customer retention.
If you can regularly interact with your customers and keep your messages in sync with their demands and needs, chances are they’ll become customers for life. Moreover, your marketing database will give you insight into how your customers feel about your service or product. Do they like it? Are they dissatisfied? You can continually improve your products and services based on this information.
Spend funds wisely
Marketing databases can help you allocate funds for marketing and promotional campaigns wisely. You don’t have to rely on blanket communication methods anymore. You should check your response rates from time to time and increase the ROI with increased targeted campaigns.
Are you a small business without a huge budget to hire more employees? You can stretch your marketing dollars by hiring experts in data administration and management. Hiring experts is often the quickest way to see results, especially when you’re creating a marketing database for the first time because they already know what to do.
Utilize business resources wisely
With the help of a marketing database, you can identify trends, pull relevant campaign files, and track results to help you utilize manpower and business resources wisely. You can go in for marketing automation and integrate with your database as well.
Increase available information and data
Data, properly understood, is information. Data on its own doesn’t really help you. But segmentation and comparison of information reveals trends you can capitalize on. To do this you have to keep track of your prospects and customers. How do you do this? Marketing database. Remember, this database is usually part of a CRM system. The best known CRM is probably Salesforce, but Hubspot and others also provide good easy to use systems. In the case of Hubspot, it might even be free.
Identify your next marketing opportunity
With the help of an extensive marketing database; you can improve both your forecasting capabilities and be better equipped to spot your next marketing opportunity. The more data you collect, the more information. The more information over time you collect, the more accurate your marketing predictions might be.
Moreover, your product and sales team get the information they need to reach out and connect with prospects – even if that team is just you and your dog.
In this way, the database will help you to drive business strategy aligned with your corporate goals with success.
Marketing databases aren’t just for corporations. If you are a small business owner or have just started with a company, it makes sense to invest in a good marketing database for growth and development. Just make sure the database platform you choose caters to the needs of your growing business.
Having access to detailed customer information can give you a competitive edge in the market, enabling you to compete with larger industry leaders. A good marketing database can effectively make your customers happy, which leads to greater customer loyalty and retention, which can be difficult to do when you’re just starting a business.
