Improve Your List Performance through Social Scraping

For most businesses, especially B2B organizations, your lists are one of your most valuable marketing tools. What you know about your customers and prospects affects your ability to sell to them. If you want to acquire new customers, you have to either purchase or build lists. Ask yourself this: Are my lists good enough to help me meet my sales goals over the next year?

One of the things that the recent economic swing has done is dramatically shake up businesses across the country. Layoffs and reorganizations are now the rule, not the exception. All of the personnel changes are making in-house and purchased lists far less accurate than they used to be. The names and phone numbers you have for the CIO, for example, or any other title of the companies you’re targeting, are probably long out-of-date.

The term for collecting data to form lists is “scraping.” It’s unpleasant sounding, but it’s been a productive way to build lists. However, the typical list doesn’t provide enough information anymore. It’s not enough to just have the clients’ title and phone number, and maybe their email. You need to know a lot more about them in order to attract their interest.

Everyone is so inundated with messages today that you have to become very targeted to get through and capture someone’s attention. Massive shotgun marketing campaigns just aren’t producing the returns that most companies need. What is working is more personalized approaches - campaigns that segment their messages based upon factors that aren’t included in most lists, including age, interests, purchasing habits, affiliations, and more. With this type of detailed information, you can craft messages that appeal to specialized segments of your audience while still promoting the same product or service, but with the language, messages, and visuals that specifically appeal to separate areas.

How are you going to collect this data? Social scraping is the answer.

Start with your own customers. You’ll need to expand your intelligence about them, adding fields to your CRM, if necessary. Then, you’ll need to connect with them through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll learn about them and, what’s more important, they’ll help you and show you how to shape your messages to attract them.

Use your existing prospect lists and start following more people on Twitter. You’re not following them to start selling to them but to start listening to them. Find out what their interests are beyond your product area. Begin adding to your lists. Observe who they follow and track their responses. Over time, you’ll collect valuable information that will keep your lists accurate and help you form campaigns that are better targeted and more effective.

Does that sound time consuming and difficult? It might be, but put a few interns on the job and task your marketing department with the job of expanding what you know about customers and prospects. Make it a part of each sales representative’s job. Look for ways to target your marketing at more than just one possible customer type. Start segmenting your message to attract the interests of a wide variety of prospects.

Social media is providing a gold mine of information for those who are willing to dig. I’d love to talk with you about how you can take advantage of social media and develop more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

What Carnival Cruise Lines Can Learn From NASA

Just a couple of weeks ago US & World News prominently featured the story of the Carnival Cruise ship that had an engine room fire, lost power, and had to be towed back to port. The passengers went from enjoying luxury treatment to camping out and eating Spam. I thought that the company did a pretty good job of admitting fault and trying their best to take care of the passengers. They refunded their money and offered them a future cruise for free.

But within days of the story, I received an email from Airtran announcing a deal with Carnival Cruise Lines. The big headline: “Distressed Cabin Sale.”

From everything that I can tell, the email was unrelated to the news. I’m betting it was a partner ad that they’d had in the queue scheduled for release. Instead of enticing me with an attractive discount, their email only reminded me of their recent disaster, painting a rather negative image.

I’ve traveled on Carnival before and I’ve had nothing but the best experiences. So, this idea of a “distressed cabin” left me somewhat unsettled.

Now, I know how these things work. Companies plan their campaigns in advance and have them set to drop on pre-determined dates. However, you can’t just blindly pull the trigger on these things. Even if you are in love with your creative idea, and have spent a lot of time and money developing it, if the timing is wrong, it may backfire, costing you even more in brand image dollars.

A marketing campaign is like a space shuttle launch - Mission Control watches ALL of the factors, not just internally, but also the weather and the sky around them. They have to make sure that everything is clear before they launch, monitoring the conditions every step of the way.

Like NASA, you must plan and queue up work, but then pay attention to what’s going on in your space. Keep an eye on the news, your competitors, and your customers, or in this case, your partner’s company. Even the best message can fall apart if you get the timing wrong.

With a few extra minutes, Carnival’s Mission Control could have taken a second look at the flyer and come up with a better lead- in for their ad. For instance, “$159 Cabin Closeout Sale - How Quickly Can You Pack?” Not only does this create urgency, but it also highlights the phenomenal bargain without making you think you’re buying something damaged.

How well are you monitoring your marketing efforts? Do you have a “T minus 60 and holding” pause built into your campaigns?

Let us know. I’d love to talk with you about how we work with our customers to build campaigns and monitor their pre-launch conditions and post-launch results. I’d be happy to share my cruise tips with you, too.