To successfully market themselves, all advice/planning firms need an audience or, as Seth Godin calls it, a tribe. There are several ways to create that audience, including lead magnet campaigns, but there’s one that’s often overlooked.

So, in his first guest blog for us, Gareth Perry, Managing Director of Databroker explains more.

Over to Gareth…

When it comes to marketing, I’m a big believer in getting the targeting accurate.

I know some companies still subscribe to the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach; it’s not my bag. GDPR did help to get rid of some ill-conceived marketing, with most cold B2B marketing now processed under legitimate interest, but GDPR was not the all-conquering data privacy rethink that it was badged up to be.

There’s still plenty of irrelevant marketing. This week alone, info@data-broker.co.uk has received marketing for HGV fleets, TikTok campaigns and manufacturing services, all totally irrelevant.

If Databroker were part of a targeted audience, we wouldn’t receive any of this marketing.

As a list broker, we spend our working lives matching client audiences with suitable data lists, whether that be UK data, international, private sector, public sector, FTSE, bespoke list builds or data enhancement – we offer the lot. But we start by focusing on the client brief, not the size of the order.

Before I forget, we do this for B2B marketing, not consumer data. Since GDPR, we’ve kept ourselves solely focused on business data.

What about specific target audiences for marketing in the financial sector?

I would apply the same logic as I do for every brief. Once we understand the audience, our experienced team can suggest suitable lists for consideration.

Here are a couple of real-life examples of data sets we’ve provided to the adviser profession before:

• Adviser firm in Bath, specialists in business finance services – For this client, we learnt that over half their business comes from local business introductions, so geography was the key element to the brief. Databroker provided 5,000 records of local businesses within a 10-radius of their office, for direct mail and telephone marketing. Since the first order, we’ve supplied further data sets for their Bristol office too.
• Financial planners firm based in Yorkshire, offer retirement and financial planning to business owners – We worked with this client to build two data audiences. The first was Yorkshire-based companies, confirmed as profitable and trading for at least 5 years. In this case, we aimed at multiple contacts at the business, influencing as many key decision-makers at possible. The second profile was, again, local companies to their office, focusing on some key industry sectors where our client had previously gained good referral business.

These are just a couple of examples of what’s available.

The list of potential data selections is endless, however there are definitely some which are more suitable for the financial sector.

The below would be the most suitable campaign selections from my experience.

• Age of Director – Useful for targeting audience with promotions related to retirement, financial planning, M&A
• Financial Selections – There are loads of these which are fed from Companies House and credit feeds including Accounting Dates, Assets, Debtors, Cash, Liabilities, Shareholder Funds, Net Worth, Legal Status, VAT Status, Incorporation Date. You will be the experts on how these indicators will match up to your audience, but one bit of advice I’d add would be to keep the rest of your data brief more general, because these financial indicators can be sparsely populated due to availability.
• Sectors Campaigns – We get a lot of success with our own marketing by targeting specific sectors with suitable packages, especially when we have experience and case studies to back us up.
• Specialist Lists – There are so many, such as FTSE, fast-growing, ethical employers, importers/exporters, online retailers, apprenticeship levy payers and so on.
• Introducer Campaigns – In the financial sector, word-of-mouth remains a key source of business, so getting business referrals and recommendations is vital. Databroker could put together a dataset of potential introducers such as accountants, solicitors, and other linked businesses.
• Data Enhancement – Often the best place to start, especially if you look at your existing client data and think “what a mess”! These projects start with a Data Health Check, which allows us to pinpoint the gaps and weaknesses in your database and show you the like-for-like audience which you don’t currently engage with.

Remember, the key starting point is your data brief.

From there, our team will reach out to our network of GDPR-compliant list providers and provide you with impartial recommendations for your data sourcing. In essence, we’re just like an insurance broker, but our commodity is business data.

Our industry does sometimes get an unfortunate press. As I said at the start, whilst GDPR did tidy up B2B marketing a bit, it wasn’t perfect and we’re still tarnished by some poor quality list providers.

Sadly, every week, we speak to prospects who’ve had their fingers burnt by previous data purchase. This is why I recommend dealing via a list broker and not direct. List brokers, like Databroker, ensure our providers are regularly checked for data accuracy and full compliance.

We know every detail of each provider, how they gather the data, how they keep it updated, and how they make sure that GDPR and data privacy is squeaky clean.

Learn more

Gareth Perry is the Managing Director of Databroker, the UK’s most experienced list broker.

With over 12 years’ experience in B2B data himself, Gareth leads an expert team of list brokers delivering targeted B2B data to a wide-ranging client audience from SMEs to national brands, across every sector.

Databroker has been working with Yardstick and their clients for nearly three years, supplying B2B data for wealth management, financial planning and accountancy campaigns to name a few. Databroker supply B2B marketing databases matched to specific client needs, for UK and international briefs. They also supply business data list cleansing and enhancement services.

Contact Gareth and the Databroker Team on:

Switchboard: 0161 941 5700
DDI: 0161 883 0273
Email: gareth.perry@data-broker.co.uk
Website: www.data-broker.co.uk
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/garethperry1985/