B2b data is at the heart of every digital marketing campaign a company launches nowadays. Building Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) upon it will guarantee that your offers and messages can hit the right audience.
ICP marketing depends on high-quality marketing data heavily. That’s why you must pick up trusted data providers to build a genuinely data-driven marketing strategy and boost your business growth. Read on, and you’ll find out why b2b data matters and how to choose a b2b data provider that meets your business goals.
How Third-party B2B Data Fuels ICP Marketing
B2b data underpins the following aspects of your ICP marketing activities.
It Matches Decision-Makers that Fit Your Targeting Criteria
Today, b2b companies utilize many marketing automation platforms to generate leads from paid channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google Ads. But without definite targeting criteria, PPC specialists would be literally flying blind.
ICP provides marketing 360-degree view of the target audience. Once you have it, you know exactly what company or person-level data to source to build the audience lists that will bring in qualified prospects.
It Extends ICP to Make it Actionable Across Different Teams
B2b data is vital for progressing from a vague, generalized ICP definition to a more granular one that meets the objectives of all teams. For instance, a product team can use ICP to determine product roadmaps, whereas salespeople are interested in profiles that appeal to customer pains.
Enriching the ICP dataset with additional attributes makes it case-relevant for every type of specialist.
It Keeps You Updated About Changes in Customer Behavior
B2b data can inform you about such hidden aspects of customers’ behavior as changes in their preferred tech stack. For instance, BuiltWith, the b2b data provider used for technology lookups for tech startups.
Or you can look for companies that gained a particular number of subscribers on Instagram recently. This indicates they invest in social media and might be interested in products and services that can help with their SMM activities.
It Helps to Build Case-Specific ICPs
There’s an abundance of B2B data provided by third-party services. Such diversity allows you to reimagine ICP if you launch a new product line or extend the existing ones. You can always reshape ICP to reflect other targeting criteria to promote new products successfully.
How to Choose the Right B2B Data Provider?
The market is teeming with offers from trusted and legally compliant B2B data providers. But it’s crucial to solidify your expectations and demands before choosing the right partner for your needs. Before subscribing to the provider’s plan, evaluate these primary points.
Coverage
Coverage matters when you build precise ICP targeted at B2B prospects from specific regions. That said, we’d primarily recommend you look for providers with significant coverage and breadth of location data. Make sure you can set various attributes to filter out the audience that would fit – or can even expand – your ICP.
Completeness of Company and Person-Level Data
The more complete and up-to-date records are, the more useful they’ll be. You can assess the completeness of company and person-level data from free data samples requested from the provider.
When assessing people’s data, pay attention to such attributes as:
- Job title
- Job experiences
- Level of expertise (education)
- Corporate email address
- Phone number
- Social media accounts (optionally).
As for company-level data, we recommend you evaluate such attributes as:
- Industry
- Headcount
- Funding
- Annual revenue
- Number of vacant positions.
Constantly Updated Data
Statistics show that b2b businesses constantly come into being, merge, and go bust. In particular, about 10% of startups don’t survive the first year, according to Exploding Topics.
That means you must be sure about the up-to-dateness of the b2b data you source. Normally, data providers update and cleanse their databases at least once a month. You can verify whether a provider refreshes customer records by looking into a data sample. Also, feel free to ask sales representatives directly about data update frequency.
Base Data Sets vs. Niche Data Sets
Depending on the provider’s specialization, you can expect them to serve broad-based or niche data sets. So the choice is yours, and it’s always reasonable to consider which type of data will suit your needs.
Niche data sets typically reflect particular sides of business workflows and operations. Such could be:
- Technographic attributes
- Social following & advertising statistics
- Various intent signals (hiring, scaling up, merging).
The truth is that you can benefit from both broad-based and niche data when building an ICP. Primer and similar audience-building platforms can simultaneously source data from several b2b data providers and match and merge it in a single audience list.
Eventually, you’ll get a comprehensive and ICP-compliant list of qualified prospects to push to various ad platforms. Such customer data enrichment enables you to generate high-quality leads across every digital marketing channel.
