Marketing Databases: Build and Maintain Your Most Valuable Marketing Asset

Successful Lead Generation Campaigns Depend Upon Your Marketing Database

What’s the database development and maintenance scene like in your firm? Have a best practice or success stories you want to share? Comment below!

Eleventh in a series of posts about the transformations in CPA, financial services, law and consulting firm marketing (New Rules for Professional Services Marketing)

If you’re in need of some entertainment, the next strategic marketing meeting your firm has, stand up and boldly proclaim, “We have to fix our database AGAIN!”

Then, watch everyone rush out of the meeting at the speed of light, cursing and mumbling under their breath.

For any CPA, consulting, financial services or law firm, building and maintaining the firm’s marketing database is perhaps the most onerous, least appreciated, never ending, incredibly frustrating … but one of the most important pieces of marketing infrastructure your firm needs.

In this era of transformation of professional services marketing, your firm’s ability to so a successful lead generation campaign will be based in large measure upon the architecture, quantity, quality, and accuracy of the database.

Here’s a list of ten best practices that will help you build and maintain a database that will make your lead generation campaigns come alive:

1. Put a team in charge of the database: put a partner and a marketer together as a team with oversight and management responsibilities for every aspect of the database, from architecture to data entry policies and processes.

2. Define the architecture – once: the architecture of the database (all of the different variables) need to be considered at the onset of its build and set in stone. You don’t want to have to come back and update thousands of records because you forgot to include a field for salutation or industry, for example.

3. Limit the access: the more hands that have rights to data entry, the greater the chance that you’ll be scrubbing almost continuously. Give everybody “read” access, but severely limit “write” access to a handful of folks that have been trained and know what they’re doing and why.

4. Think “inch wide, mile deep”: Once the database is initially populated, grow it one niche at a time.

5. Grab the low hanging fruit first: start the build with your time and billing system, Outlook calendars, and rolodexes (yes, they are still around!), then go on to trade association membership directories, and a list buy.

6. Buy a list, but beware: buying a list will not solve all of your problems. It’s a great start but even a list from a reputable broker will still need a substantial amount of scrubbing before it’s “outbound ready”.

7. Do the spade and shovel work: the most effective and clean databases are those that are built by hand, one entry at a time. This is work that demands a combination of attention to detail and commitment. Think “intern”.

8. Schedule a database clean-up week at least once per year: Want to get you partners up in arms and mad at you? Nothing will do that faster than frequent requests asking them to clean up the database. Consider scheduling one week a year where everyone pitches in to the scrub and update – like spring cleaning, but without the fresh smell of lemon Pledge.

9. Hold a contest and give rewards for entries: To make the spring clean-up a bit more palatable, consider holding a contest for most new and cleaned entries by team. The winning team gets a fabulous prize; the losing team gets ineffective lead generation campaigns.

10. Create a database culture: commitment and accountability will be key to building and maintaining a quality database, and that begins with culture change. It’s tough to make a commitment to an onerous task, but it’s even tougher if you don’t know why that task is important for the firm.

Please share your observations and insights on how to develop and maintain a database that works!