The lifeblood of any business selling directly to consumers is a steady flow of viable, actionable leads. How you generate those leads will differ depending on the type of business you operate. For an online retailer, for example, your own website or app can drive much of your business. Consumer-oriented trade shows and special events work well in many markets, and a savvy social media presence can work wonders.
Often, though — especially for early-stage businesses — your ability to work those opportunities might be limited, or you may have established competitors already well entrenched in those promising niches. In those cases, you may very reasonably turn to lead generation services, with their databases of potential customers. The bad news is that these services have some very sharp limitations for B2C lead generation. The good news is that you can do better and may even pay less for the privilege.
The Problem With Legacy Lead Generation Databases
To be clear, the prominent lead generation services (you probably already know their names, but if not, you’ll find them with a quick online search) are good at what they do, within their innate limitations. If your needs correspond to their strengths, they can genuinely help you keep your business moving forward.
The issue is that their strengths are oriented more toward B2B lead generation, rather than sales to individual consumers. These legacy data providers’ information sources are primarily employer/employment oriented, which is useful when you want to sell to their employer or their specific department. If you’re “multithreading,” for example — identifying potential influencers within a company, even when their job titles don’t necessarily make them the decision-maker — that’s great info to have.
If you’re in the B2C market, on the other hand, it’s less useful. Your interest in that person isn’t their workplace or their role in making purchase decisions. Your interest is in them as an individual consumer and potential customer. Their at-work contact information is of relatively little value to you in the absence of a better window into their lives.
Brainstorming the Data You Actually Need
So if you could build a data product from the ground up, specifically to support B2C lead generation, what would that look like? Which information would you want it to serve up to you?
Again, that would vary depending on the product or service you sell. But it’s safe to assume that your wish list for basic information would include some combination of:
- Home address
- Personal email addresses
- Landline and cell phone numbers
- Whether the prospect is an owner or a renter
- Age
- How long they’ve owned or been in their home
- The kind of neighborhood they live in
- Their approximate financial standing
All of those are absolutely fundamental to understanding and successfully targeting potential customers. Your existing base of customers is a significant asset in that search. They’re already using your product or service, so logically, other people who share key characteristics with them should also be receptive.
This is already a level of detail you can’t get from legacy lead data providers. The real “secret sauce,” though, the differentiator that can give you an advantage over competitors, comes from going beyond that primary level of detail in search of richer data sets.
The Importance of Contact Data Enrichment
Richer data does two things for you. First, it sharply increases the value of the leads you purchase from a lead generation service (should you choose to go that route), as well as referrals or other leads that come in through your own marketing efforts. Additionally, that enriched data helps you prioritize leads with the highest likelihood of success. Let’s take a look at both.
Enriching Existing Contact Data
Let’s suppose you’ve been purchasing leads from a legacy lead generation service. While you’ll have a rudimentary set of data for each lead, it leaves out many of those key pieces of information we’ve just discussed. Although it’s not the focus of today’s post, the same might hold true for leads from your other marketing efforts, including referrals, incoming calls, or messages on your business’s Facebook or Instagram account.
These are all useful, but not nearly as useful as they’d be if you could quickly fill in the missing information before you reach out with your sales or marketing message. That’s what business consultants and vendors mean by “contact data enrichment,” and this is what Spokeo For Business excels at. Searching the information you do have (a name, an address, a social media username) on Spokeo will quickly provide all of that above information, and much more public information about them, in just seconds.
The more data you have, and the more connections you can make with that data, the better the picture you’ll have of your potential customer. That means your sales or marketing efforts will be more effective.
Generating Better Leads
The basic contact information you’ll receive from a legacy lead generation service is only nominally a “lead,” depending on how you define the term. Yes, you can specify crucial details such as a specific geographic area or a given age cohort. But you may still be better off thinking of those names as “contacts,” rather than leads as such. To think of them as real, qualified leads, people who fit the profile of your desired customers, you’ll need to triage them using the enriched data from a service like Spokeo For Business.
The detailed, granular data from Spokeo’s search results opens the door to meaningful analysis of these contacts. If you want to target people by their residence, down to a micro-neighbourhood level, you can do that (realtors call this “circle prospecting”). If your service or product is best targeted at owners, rather than tenants, you can do that. You can even carry out batch searches on large blocks of data, either leads you’ve purchased from a legacy vendor or (if you’ve been in business long enough) your own database of existing leads and clients.
The enriched data about your existing clients is especially useful because it will give you more insight into who’s already buying your product or service. Armed with that information, you’re better positioned to find new clients who fit the same profile. Equally important, you’ll know how to reach out to them because Spokeo searches can provide you with their public cell numbers, email addresses, and even their social media accounts. It’s a game-changer.
Harness Spokeo’s Power Across Your B2C Lead Generation Strategies
Spokeo’s capabilities make Spokeo For Business a powerful complement to your current lead generation service, if you’ve been buying leads. You can also think of it as an alternative to those legacy vendors in its own right, something that puts you in the driver’s seat regardless of your sales and marketing strategy. Let’s look at a few common small-business marketing scenarios and how you can improve your results through Spokeo’s people-search tools.
1. Direct Mail Campaigns
Your existing vendor (if applicable) may or may not provide home addresses, and they may or may not be up to date. Spokeo’s search results can fill in the missing data, so you don’t waste time and money mailing to outdated addresses. You can also determine whether the occupant is a homeowner or renter, if that’s important to you.
2. Cold Calls
Cold-calling, either by phone or in person, is nobody’s idea of a good time. So if enriched data provides you with a way to “warm” that initial contact, you’ll be ahead of the game. This might include matching their current or former home address to an existing customer, for example (“I’m the guy who did the new roof next door, when you were living on Persimmon Court”). A de-cluttering service might mention how long the contact has lived in their current home, and how a good purge can set them up for their life’s next stage. The possibilities are endless.
3. Your Social Media Presence
Social media has its downsides, but for small and medium-sized businesses, it offers a wealth of opportunities for successful marketing and lead generation. Posting good content on your own page and encouraging clients and random readers to like and share it is an excellent way to raise your profile. So is joining local community pages and making yourself or your enterprise visible there.
These interactions aren’t always valuable in themselves, because you may only have a username to work from. But a quick search on Spokeo will tell you who’s behind that username, and provide the same full suite of public information we’ve already discussed. With that in hand, you can quickly assess which of these contacts can be classed as legitimate leads.
Try It Today
Depending on the nature of your product or service, you may find that you get good results by providing demonstrations at trade shows and public events. Letting potential buyers try things for themselves is even more powerful if that’s a practical option; it’s why Costco spends so much time and effort on in-store samples.
Spokeo is no different. While the company has been around for almost 20 years at the time of writing, Spokeo For Business is a relatively new product that we’re very excited about. That’s why we’re happy to offer an in-depth demonstration of how you can use it to generate leads and drive sales, or — better yet — actually test-drive it for yourself with a hands-on, no-cost trial. To find out more about those options, or to ask questions about Spokeo For Business and how it’s used, reach out to our team today using the contact information on our Business page.
Note: This article is not intended as legal advice. You should not engage in new business processes or strategies, or alter existing ones, without seeking advice from your own legal and/or compliance experts. You cannot use information from Spokeo to make any phone call or send any email or text message that does not comply with CAN-SPAM, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act or any other applicable federal or state law.
Sources
Mailchimp: Better Data, Better Results: An Overview of Data Enrichment
Forbes: Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide