Small Business Marketing
Database and Database Marketing
Written by Richard San Juan for Gaebler Ventures
Entrepreneurs and other individuals looking to make the most money at the least amount of time try to employ complex business strategies to sell their product or service. Oftentimes, however, they often overlook a simple strategy that helps them target the largest number of potential customers, especially if the use the Internet as a tool of marketing. Maintaining a solid database can increase your revenues and decrease marketing costs.
Maintaining a marketing database does not seem like an exciting business strategy, does it?
It sounds mundane when compared to the flair and ingeniousness of developing an exciting marketing proposal. However, both are equally as important in determining the success of the product or service.
Having established a solid and organized database in the early stages of your company, a smart entrepreneur has a great opportunity to increasing revenues while decreasing marketing costs.
Regarding customer relations, an entrepreneur or small business owner can improve customer relations by keeping your brand fresh in the minds of your target market. Keeping in touch with them through the marketing database will do exactly that.
Making the most of your marketing database will put you in a good position within your market sector relevant to your competitors. Therefore, the question is not whether an individual should incorporate database management into your business operations but instead how to do it and get the biggest bang for your buck.
The best way to generate interest in your product is of course to develop a website where potential clients and customers can analyze, compare, and contrast your product or service. However, the other purpose of the website is to gather information about your web visitors and catalog them in a database.
Eventually, the data collected on a website can be used to craft your targeted marketing strategies. The type of information you are looking for can vary depending on what the target segment is. Usually the basic information such as location, gender, and age will suffice.
This type of basic information is pretty easy to collect, but anything more specific is harder to get from people. Perhaps offering them something free or at a discount will entice them to give a little bit more specific information about themselves.
For example, you can have them fill out either an e-mail survey or online questionnaire form. If they agree to do it, they will get a free gift. Everyone likes free stuff. Sometimes you have to give a little something to get a little more information online. However, that little more information that will be added to the database will help adjust your marketing campaign to be more effective.
As your company website becomes popular and begins to generate heavy traffic, you may have more people willing to give out their information to you.
Without proper database management, all the data would be hard to manage and would be very confusing. The company would lose valuable time and financial resources trying to sort it out manually.
Having database management in place enables a company to process all the information they receive and determine who your best types of customers are. Promotional and advertising efforts can then be concentrated towards that target group.
Richard San Juan is currently pursuing an MBA degree with an emphasis in Finance from DePaul University in Chicago. He is particularly interested in writing about business news and strategies.
Share this article
Additional Resources for Entrepreneurs
Conversation Board
Do you use database marketing as part of your marketing efforts? Is it easy or hard? Please share your experiences and any tips you might have to offer to other entrepreneurs who visit this website. Thanks!