Posted by: ausdb on: February 18, 2009
Marketing to your customers is one thing but imagine being able to market directly to prospects in a given area? Imagine being able to find the perfect demographic for your market at any given time? You can do this with location marketing. First of all you will need to find a database of locations and what prospects will be present in these locations. Then from there you will be able to narrow down into demographics such as Age, Income & Product Preference.
Proximity marketing is the localized wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place. Transmissions can be received by individuals in that location who wish to receive them and have the necessary equipment to do so.
Distribution may be via a traditional localized broadcast, or more commonly is specifically targeted to devices known to be in a particular area.
The location of a device may be determined by:
- A cellular phone being in a particular cell
- A Bluetooth or WiFi device being within range of a transmitter.
- An Internet enabled device with GPS enabling it to request localized content from Internet servers.
Communications may be further targeted to specific groups within a given location, for example content in tourist hot spots may only be distributed to devices registered outside the local area.
Communications may be both time and place specific, e.g. content at a conference venue may depend on the event in progress.
Uses of proximity marketing include distribution of media at concerts, information (weblinks on local facilities), gaming and social applications, and advertising.
Posted by: ausdb on: February 4, 2009
As any business owner would know it is sometimes hard to source new leads or new prospects to create new business and in turn drive sales up. Hence sourcing good, fresh, new data for a marketing campaign can be a daunting task for any business owner or marketing manager.
Here at Australian Business Databases we are always looking to find the most effective and inexpensive marketing databases and expose them to the public. Our goal is to source cheap business databases for both businesses and consumers.
Lets investigate the differences between Consumer & Business databases and how to create new business using a marketing database.
Although organizations of any size can employ database marketing, it is particularly well-suited to companies with large numbers of customers. This is because a large population provides greater opportunity to find segments of customers or prospects that can be communicated with in a customized manner. In smaller (and more homogeneous) databases, it will be difficult to justify on economic terms the investment required to differentiate messages. As a result, database marketing has flourished in sectors, such as financial services, telecommunications, and retail, all of which have the ability to generate significant amounts transaction data for millions of customers.
Database marketing applications can be divided logically between those marketing programs that reach existing customers and those that are aimed at prospective customers.
Business Database Data Type: Consumer data
In general, database marketers seek to have as much data available about customers and prospects as possible.
For marketing to existing customers, more sophisticated marketers often build elaborate databases of customer information. These may include a variety of data, including name and address, history of shopping and purchases, demographics, and the history of past communications to and from customers. For larger companies with millions of customers, such data warehouses can often be multiple terabytes in size.
Marketing to prospects relies extensively on third-party sources of data. In most developed countries, there are a number of providers of such data. Such data is usually restricted to name, address, and telephone, along with demographics, some supplied by consumers, and others inferred by the data compiler. Companies may also acquire prospect data directly through the use of sweepstakes, contests, on-line registrations, and other lead generation activities.
Business Database Data Type: Business data
For many business-to-business (B2B) company marketers, the number of customers and prospects will be smaller than that of comparable business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Also, their relationships with customers will often rely on intermediaries, such as salespeople, agents, and dealers, and the number of transactions per customer may be small. As a result, business-to-business marketers may not have as much data at their disposal as business-to-consumer marketer are accustomed.One other complication is that B2B marketers in targeting teams or “accounts” and not individuals may produce many contacts from a single organization. Determining which contact to communicate with through direct marketing may be difficult. On the other hand it is the database for business-to-business marketers which often includes data on the business activity about the respective client.
These data become critical to segment markets or define target audiences, e.g. purchases of software license renewals by telecom companies could help identify which technologist is in charge of software installations vs. software procurement, etc. Customers in Business-to-Business environments often tend to be loyal since they need after-sales-service for their products and appreciate information on product upgrades and service offerings. This loyalty can be tracked by a database.
Sources of customer data often come from the sales force employed by the company and from the service engineers. Increasingly, online interactions with customers are providing B2B marketers with a lower cost source of customer information.
For prospect data, businesses can purchase data from compilers of business data, as well as gather information from their direct sales efforts, on-line sites, and specialty publications.
Posted by: ausdb on: February 3, 2009
When you are marketing to new customers (prospects) or existing customers you may employ the usage of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. There have been many advancements over the last few years which we will now delve into.
While the idea of storing customer data in electronic formats to use them for database-marketing purposes has been around for decades, the computer systems available today make it possible to gain a comprehensive history of client behavior on-screen while the business is transacting with each individual, producing thus real-time business intelligence for the company. This ability enables what is called one-to-one marketing or personalization.
Today’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems use the stored data not only for direct marketing purposes but to manage the complete relationship with individual customer contacts and to develop more customized product and service offerings. However, a combination of CRM, content management and business intelligence tools are making delivery of personalized information a reality.
Marketers trained in the use of these tools are able to carry out customer nurturing, which is a tactic that attempts to communicate with each individual in an organization at the right time, using the right information to meet that client’s need to progress through the process of identifying a problem, learning options available to resolve it, selecting the right solution, and making the purchasing decision.
Because of the complexities of B2B marketing and the intricacies of corporate operations, the demands placed on any marketing organization to formulate the business process by which such a sophisticated series of procedures may be brought into existence are significant. It is often for this reason that large marketing organizations engage the use of an expert in marketing process strategy and information technology (IT), or a marketing IT process strategist. Although more technical in nature than often marketers require, a system integrator (SI) can also play an equivalent role to the marketing IT process strategist, particularly at the time that new technology tools need to be configured and rolled out.
New advances in cloud computing and marketing’s penchant for both outsourcing services to third-party agencies and avoiding involvement in the creation of complex technological tools has provided a fertile soil for Software as a Service (SaaS) providers to centralize the marketing database under a hosting service model that incorporates functions from CRM, content management and business intelligence under one offering to automate the marketing process.
Posted by: ausdb on: February 2, 2009
Welcome to the Australian Business Databases website/blog. We will be featuring articles and information on everything you need to know about marketing to business in Australia using databases. What is the best Aussie Business DB? How do you find targeted lists? How do you find business prospects within your category of business? These questions and many more will be answered over time.
For now lets look at the definition of Database Marketing:
Database marketing is a form of direct marketing using databases of customers or potential customers to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product or service for marketing purposes. The method of communication can be any addressable medium, as in direct marketing.
The distinction between direct and database marketing stems primarily from the attention paid to the analysis of data. Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques to develop models of customer behavior, which are then used to select customers for communications. As a consequence, database marketers also tend to be heavy users of data warehouses, because having a greater amount of data about customers increases the likelihood that a more accurate model can be built.
The “database” is usually name, address, and transaction history details from internal sales or delivery systems, or a bought-in compiled “list” from another organization, which has captured that information from its customers. Typical sources of compiled lists are charity donation forms, application forms for any free product or contest, product warranty cards, subscription forms, and credit application forms.
The communications generated by database marketing may be described as junk mail or spam, if it is unwanted by the addressee. Direct and database marketing organizations, on the other hand, argue that a targeted letter or e-mail to a customer, who wants to be contacted about offerings that may interest the customer, benefits both the customer and the marketer.
Some countries and some organizations insist that individuals are able to prevent entry to or delete their name and address details from database marketing lists.
Posted by: ausdb on: February 1, 2009
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