Every business needs an all-inclusive database marketing strategy that fits their business model and provide a good return on investment. In times when social media and other forms of advertising get the most attention, building your own database could be an asset that can give you an edge over your competitors.
Below are strategies that can help you build your online marketing database to achieve your marketing and business goals.
Internal Database
Building an internal database is a long-term strategy that can harvest incredible results over time. Not only for direct marketing objectives, building an internal customer database can enhance reputation of your business, making it appealing to the investors. It saves the cost of customer acquisition and makes businesses less reliant on expensive advertising sources.
You can build your database through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Savvy marketers bid on less expensive “top of funnel” search phrases on Google to increase their lead generation efforts, by getting users to sign up to their company’s email list. This approach won’t result in conversions immediately, but it helps you attract your target audience.
Another way is through content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). By ranking for keywords organically on search engines like Google, Bing, and YouTube, businesses can offer gated content, whereby contact information is exchanged for access to premium content, like guides, e-books and newsletters.
External Database
More experienced marketers look past email sign-ups and build an online database of individuals through third-party data sources. By doing so, they can tap into Google’s search database to build their own online database of potential customers. This can be done by creating remarketing lists of individuals that search for specific keywords.
These high-intent audiences can then be remarketed to on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even on Google at a far cheaper cost. The key is to brainstorm keywords your target audience might uses to search for information and build an online database of high-intent audiences.
B2B Marketers also can leverage LinkedIn’s database of business professionals to build their database. This can be done through LinkedIn Gen Forms or through Sponsored Content on LinkedIn’s newsfeed.
Facebook is also another external source that can be used to build a database and market directly to potential customers. You can build a list of messenger subscribers internally within Facebook or use advertising products like Facebook Lead ads to direct interested prospects into a customer-relationship management (CRM) system.
Retaining Existing Customers
Building a database of new clients is only a part of your complete database marketing strategy, you can’t overlook the fact that you need to make constant effort to retain your existing loyal customers. Acquiring new customers have higher cost than re-engaging with existing customers. Smart marketers ensure that their most profitable customers are always satisfied.
If you monitor the activity in your customer database, it can help you tailor experiences, offers and messaging to specific individuals with the goal of improving retention and customer loyalty.
Conclusion
Your business has limited resources to establish an effective marketing strategy, having a database of your target audience can help you run marketing and promotion campaigns with greater success, as you are reaching out to an audience that is already interested in your products, services and your business.
Your database building practice should flow parallel to your marketing strategy and should be integrated in every aspect of your business operations so that you don’t miss a potential client. You can use your entire online presence to funnel interested audience to your database and work on turning them into lead, ultimately increasing your revenue and achieving your KPIs.
Over time, marketers aim to nurture their marketing database to form a perceived one-on-one long-term relationship with customers. This is only possible by categorising them and formulating your marketing strategies according to their needs. This customization practice helps improve open rates, click-through rates and sales.
Moreover, increasing customer lifetime value through effective database marketing strategies enable businesses to spend more on advertising, thereby outperforming competitors with limited advertising budgets.
About the Author
Naila Yasir
Naila is Content Developer at Ava IT Solutions & Consulting, Dubai.
She is self-published author, skilled at articulating an extensive range of online content.
