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Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, when Thomas Sikki, started his first business as a healthcare equipments supplier, the biggest challenge in front of him was to identify potential customers to promote his offerings and generate considerable sales. There are thousands of budding entrepreneurs like Thomas Sikki who are trying to make it big but have no clue how and where to start from. Reasoned to this, a huge number of businesses do not even reach their Break Even Points and meet an unfortunate destiny.
Thousands of start-ups do not fail because their ideas do not click or the market is too crowded for them to flourish, they fail because they fail to market their business the right way. At the embryonic stage when a start-up has hardly any reputation to display, a well-thought out marketing plan can really do wonders. However, an entrepreneur should know that the fuel for an excellent marketing strategy is high quality data. Without reliable data in hand, any marketing activity will just eat up their resources without bringing them any success.
How to Build/ Acquire Marketing Data?
A lot of businesses undermine the importance of marketing data and expect their sales teams to find prospect details and reach them for business. What they largely compromise on is the efficiency of their sales teams who can otherwise be focused on generating sales rather than searching for customer data. What may help instead is having a dedicated data team on board who can constantly work towards building a reliable database to power sales operations in an efficient way.
Then again, most start-ups are beleaguered with resource constraints and it becomes difficult for them to employ a separate data team. One of the best alternatives to setting up a data team is buying a targeted database from a reliable vendor. Investing in marketing data may initially seem like an expense, but in the long run it can really prove to be one of your most rewarding investments.
There are hundreds of marketing database vendors you can choose from depending on the industry and region you operate in and their understanding of your industry and nature of operations. However you should never fall for unrealistic claims by data vendors and never compromise on the data quality just because you were too impressed with their sample list or you are offered great discounts on your purchase. That might be a trap! The final database delivered to you may not meet your expectations. You must practise due diligence and ask relevant questions before selecting a database vendor.
The Benefits You Get
Entrepreneurs these days really need to be proactive in their marketing operations. Omni-channel marketing campaigns may not be the best option considering the growing competition and globalized nature of business. Your database must serve you in your multi-channel marketing efforts and provide you the required impetus in your business growth.
One of the biggest challenges for a start-up is to find potential customers who may be interested in their offerings. A qualitative marketing database can expand the reach of a business by leaps and bounds and present enough opportunities for entrepreneurs to connect with their prospective customers. A highly accurate and reliable marketing database may help you gain increased message deliverability, response rate, and conversion rates that eventually contribute to increasing your returns on investments. Whether you wish to connect with your customers via email, telephone or mail, marketing data can save you from a lot of frustrations and help you direct your energies towards your core business operations.
The Ever Increasing Significance of Data
Entrepreneurs must realize that their ideas may be groundbreaking but they really need be proactive in their marketing efforts to get their ideas the value they deserve. The future of marketing lies in data and its efficient use in catering customers and their varied needs. With the emergence of advanced technologies in the area of Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning, Internet of Things and the likes, the only way for a business to survive will be to stay nimble and constantly adapt to the changing paradigms in the business world. They will need to use data smartly and generate actionable insights that can help them market themselves better and discover new possibilities for their businesses to grow.
