Many B2B marketers face this problem – the launch of a new campaign is hindered by stale or even simply inaccurate leads. This is becoming increasingly common across industries – 51% of CTOs and CDOs mistrust data that drives marketing campaigns, according to recent reports.
Business today moves at a breakneck pace. Contacts leave their positions or switch industries entirely, and companies pivot radically in search of a footing in today’s economy.
All this makes targeting a challenge – but lead enrichment is there to help you follow closely what’s going on with your pool of prospects.
Lead enrichment is the process of finding and adding important information to your lead records in order to keep your data accurate and focus your targeting efforts.
Continue reading to learn more about this process.
What is Lead Enrichment?
For focused targeting, lead records should be periodically refreshed and checked for accuracy. The process of collecting and verifying lead information is called lead enrichment.
This data can include basic contact information such as your leads’ email addresses, phone numbers, and social media handles, or more detailed firmographic and demographic data that will allow you to paint a more accurate picture of your lead.
Why Enrich Leads?
Marketing and sales are increasingly driven by segmentation and personalization. The more information you have on your prospects, the more accurate your targeting will be.
However, targeting is still notoriously tricky to get just right – according to a recent report by Sales Insights Lab, around 50% of all sales prospects turn out to be mistargeted.
How will you know if your campaign is mistargeted? If you’re working with a large list of leads, yet your conversion rates remain low, that means your segmentation and targeting are not well aligned. This is when you should turn to lead enrichment.
With lead enrichment, you:
- Achieve funnel focus. Once you have enough data to construct your ideal customer profile, you can base your entire customer journey on this information. This will move leads through your sales funnel with much less friction, and in turn, provide your customers with a tailored journey – improving customer experience overall.
- Increase conversion. Lead enrichment allows you to segment your audience more easily and build entire campaigns around specific segments. The more precise your profile of a segment is, the more accurate your messaging can be – leading to an easy boost in conversion rates.
- Grow and affirm brand reputation. When your targeting is precise, you only contact people who want to be contacted and who are looking for products or services within the parameters of your offer. Eliminating low-qualified prospects from your list polishes your outreach, establishing quality brand messaging.
What types of lead enrichment data are useful?
The type of data to use in lead enrichment will depend on your current goals and ongoing campaigns.
For B2B marketing, helpful lead enrichment data can be divided into two categories:
- Contact data. Enriched data focusing on company stakeholders will include their contact information, title, persona fit, persona score, select keywords associated with their industry/role, previous work experience, tenure, education, date of contact verification, social media handles, etc.
- Account data. This includes information such as the name of the company, their website address, number of employees, industry and industry tags, SIC codes, COGS, estimated annual revenue, postal address, etc.
The Benefit of Lead Enrichment for B2B
Shorten lead forms
Lead forms are the bane of the digital marketer’s existence. If you offer forms that are too long or detailed, less people will want to fill them out fully, and the risk of them abandoning the process rises. And while short forms improve customer experience, a lot of important information won’t be captured.
Lead enrichment allows you to gather all the data you need for quality targeting and personalization without having to extract all that information via forms.
That means you can leave your forms shorter, making for a smoother funnel – and still have the necessary information to fuel your marketing and sales efforts later on.
Equalize prospects
In addition to providing information above and beyond that provided by form submissions, lead enrichment represents a great equalizer of prospects.
Different assets and campaigns generate leads in different ways – think of all the differences between download forms for white papers and reports vs. registration forms for webinars and workshops. The amount and type of data you gather via these different assets and offers will inevitably vary.
Lead enrichment is there to fill in the gaps and provide you with a complete data set – meaning no field in your sheet of prospects will remain unfilled, regardless of the way that lead was initially submitted.
Align marketing and sales efforts
With lead enrichment providing you with reliable and consistent data on your leads, segmenting your prospect pool is made easier. With crucial data points at your fingertips, you can even reverse-engineer your ideal customer profile.
Obtaining the ideal customer profile represents a bullseye for your marketing and sales team, who can work together to drive the most value from their inbound leads and tailor a smooth and satisfying customer journey.
Verify data
As industry shifts grow more and more unpredictable, verifying the information in your CRM database should be a routine process.
According to Gartner, the annual turnover rate in the US are likely to jump by 20% this year – that’s a projected 37.4 million resignations.
The companies in your lead list are likely to be affected by this rise in resignations as much as anyone else. In order to always be able to assess the culture and priority shifts of your prospective clients, it’s essential to continuously update your database.
However, performing that manually—even for relatively short lists— is a chore. To make the process of database maintenance and verification less time-consuming and more cost-efficient, you should turn to lead enrichment software.
What Makes a Good Lead Enrichment Tool?
A quality lead enrichment tool will allow you to streamline your lead generation efforts with the bonus of keeping all your data neatly organized in one place.
Similar to other MarTech software, lead enrichment tools help you automate aspects of your marketing and sales process – allowing your teams to focus their efforts on things that really matter, such as crafting creative campaigns and building quality client relationships.
DealSignal’s lead enrichment module delivers:
- Real-time data – ensuring you’re always getting the freshest, verified information available on your leads.
- Granular insights – DealSignal appends inbound leads with third-party intent data, demographic and firmographic data on 100+ attributes.
- Scheduled syncs with CRM software – no more need for time-consuming manual transfers of data.
- 90%+ match rates – enabled with an advanced AI-powered process.
DealSignal’s Intent-base Lead Enrichment enables you to accurately segment your leads, categorizing them according to target personas. Personalization is streamlined, and automation saves your teams’ time on data entry and management while nurturing CRM health.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly shifting industry, keeping track of your prospects and making sure the data you’re relying on is verified is no easy task.
Businesses undergo rapid pivots, and people change positions and even entire industries – making your CRM full of potentially unreliable data. Add to this the limited amount of information you typically collect on your leads, and the potential for inaccurate lead generation to lead your marketing astray only grows.
Lead enrichment tools such as DealSignal provide you with granular insight necessary to segment your pool of prospects and create marketing campaigns with high-precision targeting. Lead enrichment allows you to shorten lead forms and improve customer experience, equalize your prospects, align marketing and sales teams, and keep the data in your CRM healthy.
Optimize Your Lead Scoring with Deal Signal
Schedule a free demo with DealSignal to identify your ideal customer profile.
Optimize your lead scoring and routing – schedule a free demo with DealSignal to learn firsthand how we can help you identify your ideal customer profile and boost your conversion rates with data.
Learn more about Lead Enrichment and B2B marketing
- Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: Key Differences, Strategies, and More
- Intent Data : How to Use it to Generate Quality Sales and Marketing Leads
- Data Accuracy & Coverage: Why DealSignal is the #1 Zoominfo Competitor
- Accuracy Matters: Why You Should Look Into ZoomInfo Alternatives
- The Best Lead Enrichment Software
- How ABM Decision-Maker Lists & Lead Enrichment from DealSignal Helped Pramata Lift Conversions 4x
- DealSignal Introduces Intent-based Inbound Lead Enrichment
- Data Accuracy & Coverage: Why DealSignal is the #1 Zoominfo Competitor
- Salesforce Lead Enrichment
