How to Build Your B2B Data Universe

These days getting new contact data is simple isn’t it? Simply create a form on your website that people have to fill in to access your very best content and you get to capture all those prospects who are ready and willing to engage. Building a database in this way, using your own digital assets is a lot more straight forward than it used to be, but is that the most effective way of getting new data for your lead generation?

Surely buying a list of qualified contacts from a reputable provider is a quicker and more reliable way of adding to your database?

Both sides of this argument have their evangelicals, some telling us building data takes too much time others that buying data is useless as it suffers too much from reliability and engagement issues. But are we looking at this in the wrong way? What if we combine both approaches?

For example if you need results quickly it’s no good waiting around and hoping people will land on your website and give you their details. However by using a bought in list and running email or telemarketing campaigns you can drive a large amount of traffic to your webpages in a short amount of time.

What’s the point of this if you already have the prospects details? By driving this traffic to your website you drive engagement and by tracking a prospects engagement you automatically begin the nurture cycle and ultimately start to refine your top leads.

Of course this is not a one size fits all solution as there will still be situations where you need results quickly and therefore cannot wait for engagement – driven or not. There is also the uncertainty of whether we will still be able to purchase data lists under what will be the new EU data protection regulations. However as marketers we need to use all the tools at our disposal to get ahead of the competition.

In our latest blog we've looked at different methods of growing a database and how they compare in terms of cost, timescale, engagement and reliability.