With companies around the world embracing digitization, automation, and new technologies in a bid to drive efficiency and get an edge on competitors, those that have access to the best data – and know how to leverage it – are best placed to win.

How can you use data to generate high-quality sales leads for your small business?

Let’s find out.

Recap the basics

First, let’s cover a few fundamentals.

Sales and marketing – where does one end and the other begin? In many organizations the roles can get a bit blurred, but generally speaking, it’s the marketing team’s job to generate leads (unqualified target customers that seem to be a match with customer profiles) for the sales team to turn into prospects (qualified leads that match customer profiles) and then convert into customers.

Marketing activity to generate leads falls into two categories:

• Outbound marketing: this refers to ‘push’ tactics such as telemarketing or buying ad billboard space. It’s about going out and communicating directly with target customers.
• Inbound marketing: this includes ‘pull’ tactics such as content marketing, social media marketing and email marketing. It’s all about raising brand awareness and establishing your expertise so that your customers come to you.

Right, now let’s dive into how your business can engage in this sort of activity to generate high-value leads.

Take the first step

Any successful marketing plan or sales strategy starts with understanding your customers.

Whether you carry out surveys, run focus groups, or analyze the data you have available, study your customers and build personas or ideal customer profiles.

Ian Green, Head of Sales at RoyaltyRange, says: “Results-based sales and marketing depends on data. Most businesses are pushing to become more data-led, but not all data is equal. Data can be irrelevant, unreliable, or difficult to unearth, and if you’re basing your activity on the wrong data, you’re wasting your budget.”

“With access to the right kind of business data, such as accurate firmographic data, sales and marketing teams can confidently identify and approach high-value leads that match their ideal customer profiles in a way that can get them a much better return on investment.”

Read more about the importance of accurate firmographic data.

These target customer profiles will be the basis of both your outbound and inbound marketing. Next, you can start to use these profiles to identify real-life customers that are a match – and to understand where you can reach them and what they want to know about.

Generate leads with outbound marketing

The more traditional side of marketing, outbound marketing involves taking your ideal customer profiles, identifying similar real-life customers, and going out and speaking directly to them.

Outbound marketing activity can include events such as trade shows or seminars, cold calling/telemarketing, social media messaging and ads, direct mail campaigns, print ads (newspapers, magazines), billboard ads, and TV ads.

While inbound marketing takes longer (to create all the content, build authority, and wait for leads to come to you), outbound marketing is an effective strategy – as long as you don’t blow your marketing budget by targeting the wrong types of customers.

Generate leads with inbound marketing

Start by creating a landing page on your website that’s optimized for conversion and SEO so it has the best chance of appearing in search engine results when people look for related topics.

This landing page might have a simple call to action such as “make an enquiry”, “request a demo” or “get in touch”, in which case leads will be referred to your sales team, or you can include what’s known as a lead magnet – a resource that’s available to people if they enter their email address.

Assuming you have the requisite data privacy permissions, you can follow up on their interest with a sequence of emails highlighting your proposition and how they can find out more. This kind of automated activity can really free up sales teams to add value with other tactics.

When your optimized landing page is ready, you need to make sure people can get to it easily. Promote it by publishing related webinars, blog posts, social media posts (focusing on the platforms where your audience spends time), and any other content that establishes your expertise and supports your customers at different stages of their journey. Make sure your supporting content includes links to relevant content on your website and to your landing page.

The beauty of inbound marketing is that, by setting out your stall as catering to a particular audience for a particular range of solutions, the leads you generate should already be well qualified and have a high likelihood of becoming customers.

Level up your lead generation with the right data

The RoyaltyRange databases and tools are now available for sales and marketing teams, meaning you can access rich data for more than 85 million companies, including size, industry, region, FTEs, revenue, inventories, and profits.

Navigate the database using intuitive tools and 60+ filters to find the premium company data you need to zero in on high-value sales opportunities and develop powerful marketing and personalization strategies.

Tax authorities, international consulting companies and multinational enterprises across over 70 countries rely on our databases and tools for accurate and efficient transfer pricing, royalty pricing, setting loan interest rates, and now sales and marketing professionals can benefit too.

It couldn’t be easier to start using our solutions. Request a one-off database lead search today, or choose from a range of subscription packages and enjoy full access to our premium tools and databases.

Learn more about how our company database can improve your sales, marketing and growth strategies, or arrange a free demo at a time to suit you.

Explore more resources and read more insights.