Building a Targeted List

One of the best ways to save budget this year is limiting your marketing programs to targeted prospects only. It’s a sound strategy because you don’t have to shave the number of touches, creative or media, if you just cut the list of campaign recipients.

Sound easy? Well, it’s not hard – it just takes a few extra steps.

The first step is honing in on the specific criteria for a target contact and target account. You will want to reach contacts with the ideal title and responsibilities within accounts that match size, location, industry and other qualifications that make them probable customers. The more detailed the criteria, the better the list.

It is possible to rent or purchase a list through specialized industry sites and publications.

But, often the very best target lists are built through a series of steps:
1. Get a list of the target companies that match your criteria – if you don’t have the list internally, you can purchase a list of companies from Jigsaw, D&B, InfoUSA or other business databases. Get the closest contact name to your ideal title.
2. Pull the names you already have in your internal database from these specific companies.
3. Call into companies to verify the contacts that match your targets and add new target contacts
4. Load list into your database marked as target contacts and target accounts

This process might sound like it will be too time consuming or costly. However, when you think about the money you save in programs, it pays for itself many times over.

And you never want to forget the old rule:
“You will get better results sending a mediocre piece to a great list, than a great piece to a mediocre list.”

Susan Linman