Understanding your customers is the most effective way to grow sales. By analysing existing client data alongside wider market information, you can create accurate customer profiles that reveal who buys from you and why. These insights make it easier to find new prospects with the same characteristics—so your customer segmentation UK strategy is focused on those most likely to buy.

Why Customer Profiling in Marketing Matters

Customer profiling in marketing builds a clear picture of your ideal audience. But it doesn’t stop at your own database. With over 200 levels of insight, we can also identify individuals who have previously owned similar vehicles or brands. That means you’re not only profiling existing customers, but also reaching new buyers who are already aligned to your market.

This approach helps you:

• Identify who values your products and services most

• Highlight common traits across your best customers

• Target customers effectively by focusing on high-potential buyers

How to Build a Customer Profile

A strong profile combines demographic data, lifestyle information, and vehicle ownership data. This may include:

• Age, gender, relationship and household type

• Employment, occupation sector, income, and affluence

• Property type, value, tenure, and location

• Vehicle history, brand loyalty, and replacement cycle

• Lifestyle behaviour such as shopping, travel, and leisure interests

These insights support both B2C and B2B targeting, allowing businesses to refine their approach across consumer and corporate audiences.

Example: SUV Buyer Profile (Mid-Size Crossover)

To demonstrate how profiling works, here’s an example SUV buyer profile built from real ownership data. This shows how existing and potential customers can be identified using practical statistics.

Demographics

• Men and women, slightly higher proportion male

• Aged 35–79, often married or cohabiting

• Family households with or without children

Work and Income

• Employment in healthcare, education, public sector, management, and IT

• Household incomes between £40,000–£100,000, with some in £20,000–£40,000

• Established wealth and medium affluence levels

Housing and Location

• Homeowners in semi-detached, detached, or terraced homes

• Property values between £200k and £800k, council tax bands C–F

• Spread across the UK, with higher volumes in London and the South East

Lifestyle and Behaviour

• Grocery shopping at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Aldi, and Morrisons

• Travel patterns focused on the UK and Europe

• Leisure interests include gardening, home improvement, and family activities

Ownership Insight

• Current and previous ownership of similar crossover SUVs or competitor brands

• Replacement cycle every 3–4 years, often via PCP or leasing

• Strong interest in hybrid models and in-car technology

This type of automotive marketing data—linking lifestyle and affluence with vehicle ownership data—creates a clear target audience that businesses can reach more accurately.

Turning Profiles into Action

With accurate profiling and segmentation, businesses can:

• Prioritise audiences at both local and national level

• Target customers effectively by reaching not only loyal buyers but also conquest customers from competitor brands

• Keep campaigns up to date with feedback from new sales activity

Conclusion

Customer profiling is more than just profiling existing customers. By learning how to build a customer profile and combining it with over 200 levels of insight, you can understand who your ideal buyers are and identify others who fit the same pattern. With the right customer segmentation UK approach, supported by automotive marketing data, you can target customers effectively across both B2C and B2B targeting strategies.

Our marketing and contact databases give a wide view across three key areas:

• Fleet vehicle usage.
• UK-wide B2B contact database.
• UK based consumers.

These databases don’t stand alone. They connect and overlap, which allows us to build a much deeper picture of potential customers.

Consumer Data

The consumer file contains rich detail on individuals, such as:

• Demographics and lifestyle: age, household income, occupation, self-employment, director status, children, home ownership.
• Assets and financials: home type, credit information, pensions, shareholder status.
• Interests and behaviours: hobbies, sports, green technology, pets, holidays, newspaper readership.
• Automotive and insurance: whether someone drives, plus renewal dates for car, home, or health insurance.
• Contact ability: postal, email, mobile and landline numbers, plus preference flags (MPS/TPS).

This helps us, for example, identify light commercial vehicle owners who are self-employed, or pinpoint directors with an interest in sustainability.

B2B Data

The B2B file adds detail on companies, including:

• Company details: registration info, addresses, sector (SIC codes), incorporation date, turnover, profit.
• People data: director and decision-maker names, job titles, emails, phone numbers.
• Business size and health: employee counts, credit scores, health ratings, VAT numbers.
• Location and trading info: registered and trading addresses, whether the business is run from home, site type, local authority, region.

This lets us profile businesses by scale, sector, and financial standing, while also connecting the dots with directors and key contacts.

Fleet Data

The fleet file focuses on vehicle ownership and usage, including:

• Fleet size: number of total vehicles, cars, vans (LCVs), and trucks (HGVs).
• Breakdowns: bands for cars, vans, trucks, and mixed fleets.
• Contacts: decision-maker details such as job function, phone, and email.
• Business profile: company name, address, turnover, and sector (SIC codes).
• Purchase preference: indicators of buying intent or fleet policy.

This gives visibility of how businesses operate their fleets and who is responsible for purchasing or managing vehicles.

Connecting the Dots

The value comes from how these files overlap:

• Match directors and business owners in the B2B file with their records in the consumer file, revealing personal interests or lifestyle data that can inform targeted campaigns.
• Identify self-employed tradespeople in the consumer file who also appear as small businesses in the B2B file, allowing relevant fleet or service offers.
• Use interest in green technology from the consumer file to find directors whose companies might be ready for electric fleet solutions.
• Link fleet size and type to business and consumer records, helping identify companies running large van fleets or directors personally driving LCVs.
• Combine location data across all files for precise targeting by postcode, region, or urban/rural split.

By connecting these insights, targeting becomes more precise. Whether it’s reaching business owners who drive vans, or companies led by directors with an interest in green tech, our data gives you a smarter way to find the right audience.

If you’d like to know how these connections can support your campaigns, we’re here to help.

What is Solus Automotive?

Solus is a revolutionary service that empowers Automotive Sales and Marketing teams with access to high-quality, anonymised data from three robust sources across both B2B and B2C sectors, helping them unlock actionable insights that historically have never existed in one place.

With Solus Automotive you can now refine your targeting strategies, plan and personalise campaigns, action your contact strategy, analyse the results and ultimately drive better results based on the sheer volume and wealth of insights at your fingertips.

Who is Solus Automotive For?

Whether your task is the launch of a new vehicle model, identifying potential retail buyers by their demographics or supporting that local franchise dealership to target businesses who are growing rapidly and are likely to need fleet vehicles in the very near future. We help you turn complex data into a powerful tool for achieving your marketing goals.

If you are looking to promote and sell automotive services in the UK, Solus has been specifically built to address your challenges and to hit them head on. Easily customisable to your specific needs, analysing, identifying and contacting your potential customers is simple with Solus.

Just some of the challenges Solus Automotive easily overcomes.

Understand your clients even further – With over 200 retail/consumer insights and over 150 Business/fleet insights, Solus give you actionable points of intelligence to drive sales. With one solution.

Vehicle Model/Type customer profiling – Identify and prioritise your audience at a local and National level and communicate with those people with the highest propensity to buy for each specific vehicle model in your range. Include these profiles into your Solus solution to have the most dynamic and up to date understanding of your potential market.

Market Sizing – Gain a top-level view of your total potential market. Understand the crossover between business owners and their retail interests to gain untouched insight or identify swiftly growing companies to build a relationship before your competitors. Amend your contact strategy to give you the best chance of reaching your primary potential customers first.

Align market trends with reactive customers – For example, understand which potential customers take an interest in renewable energy and alternative fuels. Promoting your EV range of options to customers already seeing the benefits.

Support all teams Local & National – Just like vehicle profiles, We work with you to set your specific AOI boundaries across your Solus solution, letting you simply select the vehicle model or type you are looking to promote and the locality with two very simply filters.

Continuously learning – Along side Solus providing new and refreshed insights each month, build each sales win into your vehicle model profile to constantly understand what these new customers look like and learn how the market is reacting you your brand, messaging and approach.

Remain compliant all the time – Managing this volume of data internally can be a huge task and keeping it compliant adds to the challenge. Solus provides you access to live GDPR compliant databases, with monthly suppression services and data hygiene already taken into account, the challenge becomes more manageable – before you even decide to contact a customer.

Stop wasting money on data you don’t need – Building a data warehouse can be expensive, with huge swathes of data swiftly found to be not needed, even though you have paid for it. With Solus you pay a small monthly management fee which ensures compliance and data hygiene programs keep your feed compliant. Conduct your own analysis and then pay a fixed cost per record of data you contact, with Solus scaling inline with your business needs.

How Solus Works

Solus offers a streamlined approach to leveraging data. You receive a monthly feed of anonymised data for the whole of the UK across, B2B, Fleet and Consumer markets, tailored to your specific requirements. Meaning you can conduct analysis internally or with our team of data scientists to identify relevant target audiences.

• Business118: Comprehensive B2B insights on the UK business landscape, enabling precise customer targeting, with over 6.4 million trading companies and a wealth of marketing and financial intelligence.
• Drive Connect: Extensive fleet market data to develop cost-efficient and effective marketing campaigns to vehicle operators. Over 350K known fleets!
• Prospect Locator: Detailed B2C data with geo-demographic, historical vehicle ownership and lifestyle selectors, ideal for hyper-targeted campaigns to over 43 million consumers UK-wide.

This data can be accessed in two ways:

1. Direct delivery of specific records to your systems.
2. Seamless integration via API.

Regular data refreshes ensure that your campaigns are always fuelled by compliant, accurate, and up-to-date information.

Why is Solus Unique?

Solus sets itself apart in several keyways:

• Comprehensive Data Sources: Gain access to datasets specifically tailored for B2B, fleet, and B2C marketing.
• Flexible Integration Options: Customised files with your industry specific needs provided by data feed or integrating directly with your systems via API.
• Data Compliance: All data complies with GDPR and PECR regulations, ensuring ethical and legal marketing practices.
• Advanced Profiling: Use propensity scoring across the most diverse range of variables and detailed profiling to prioritise audiences with the highest likelihood of engagement.

Feature	Solus	Other Solutions
Data Variety	B2B, fleet, and B2C	Typically limited to one category
Privacy Compliance	Fully compliant	Varies
Flexibility	API & tailored feeds	Typically limited to one category
Pricing	Affordable maintenance fee for updates and compliance, pay-per-use for campaign data	High cost for access to full files, before you access analysis

Quality Assurance

Solus stands out with its unwavering commitment to quality:

• All data complies with GDPR and PECR regulations.
• Email marketing adheres to strict opt-in and legitimate interest guidelines, reducing compliance risks for businesses and building greater trust with customers. By ensuring communications align with legal standards, Solus helps protect your brand’s reputation while fostering more reliable and transparent relationships with your audience.
• Anonymised data is refreshed regularly to ensure accuracy.
• Transparent privacy statements provide added confidence for campaign compliance.

How to Get Started

Our expert team are waiting to answer any questions you may have. Fill in the quick contact form and a member of the Driven Marketing team will be in touch soon.

What is Solus?

Solus is a solution that helps high-volume sales businesses navigate the complexities of marketing data acquisition, integration, and analysis, which can often be costly and challenging. Fragmented information sources, convoluted data pipelines, and the ever-evolving landscape of privacy regulations can hinder marketing efforts and limit ROI.

Our solution is a revolutionary service that empowers businesses by providing access to high-quality, anonymised data from three robust sources across both B2B and B2C sectors, helping them unlock actionable insights and make informed decisions. By integrating these data streams, marketers can refine their targeting strategies, personalise campaigns, and ultimately drive better results. Turning complex data into a powerful tool for achieving their marketing goals.

• Business118: Comprehensive B2B insights on the UK business landscape, enabling precise customer targeting, with over 6.4 million trading companies and a wealth of marketing and financial intelligence.
• Drive Connect: Extensive fleet market data to develop cost-efficient and effective marketing campaigns to vehicle operators. The largest B2B automotive landscape available.
• Prospect Locator: Detailed B2C data with geo-demographic and lifestyle selectors, ideal for hyper-targeted campaigns to over 43 million consumers UK-wide.

 

Who is Solus For?

Our solution is designed for businesses that rely heavily on data to optimise their marketing efforts and support sales teams.

Industries such as automotive, B2B services, retail, and direct-to-consumer brands often face unique challenges, such as identifying high-value customers, navigating complex buying cycles, or standing out in saturated markets. By addressing these issues our clients access precise targeting capabilities, robust segmentation tools, and actionable insights to drive more effective and efficient campaigns. Whether you’re launching a new product or refining your outreach, you can connect with the right audience at the right time. Whether you’re running local campaigns or national outreach, Solus scales effortlessly to meet your needs.

How Solus Works

Solus offers a streamlined approach to leveraging data. Customers receive a monthly feed of anonymised data tailored to their sector, which can be analysed internally to identify relevant target audiences. This data can be accessed in two ways:

1. Direct delivery of specific records to your systems.
2. Seamless integration via a user-friendly API.

Regular data refreshes ensure that your campaigns are always fuelled by compliant, accurate, and up-to-date information.

Why is Solus Beneficial for You?

• Improve customer targeting: Identify and reach ideal customers with unmatched precision. This means leveraging multiple detailed data insights to create finely tuned audience segments based on factors such as demographics, purchasing behaviour, or any other dynamic selection. By focusing on the most relevant prospects, businesses can reduce wasted marketing spend and increase conversion rates.
• Enhance campaign performance: Achieve measurable results using data-driven insights and tailored messaging.
• Maximise ROI: Optimise marketing expenditure and gain a higher return on investment.
• Gain a competitive edge: Leverage data-driven decision-making to differentiate your brand and drive sustainable growth. Use Solus to identify high-value customer segments and refine your messaging strategy. Boosting engagement rates but also improved overall customer loyalty, setting your brand apart from competitors.

Customising Solus for Your Specific Needs

Solus is designed with flexibility in mind, allowing businesses to tailor the platform to their unique requirements. For example, companies with multiple sales routes to market can segment their sales regions within the system. This ensures that each region or location is equipped with targeted data and insights tailored to its specific audience. By customising Solus to reflect your operational structure, businesses can:

• Align marketing efforts with localised strategies.
• Enable regional teams to access relevant data for more effective targeting.
• Simplify the management of complex, multi-channel campaigns.

Whether your focus is on national outreach or hyper-local targeting, Solus adapts to fit your needs, ensuring your marketing efforts are as efficient and impactful as possible.

Profiling Your Ideal Customer

With over 120 variables to segment data from the Business118 and Drive Connect B2B files, and over 200 lifestyle variables from the B2C Prospect Locator, Solus provides unparalleled profiling capabilities. By utilising these powerful data sets, we can help you identify exactly what your customers look like and integrate these profiles into your version of Solus.

For example, you can swiftly select the product you wish to promote and the locations you want to target, ensuring your marketing activity flows seamlessly. Additionally, by working closely with our team, your customer profiles can be continuously updated based on where you are seeing sales success. This ensures your campaigns remain agile, targeted, and effective, always focusing on the right potential customers.

Why is Solus Unique?

Solus sets itself apart in several keyways:

• Comprehensive Data Sources: Gain access to datasets specifically tailored for B2B, fleet, and B2C marketing.
• Flexible Integration Options: Choose between receiving data feeds or integrating directly with your systems via API.
• Data Compliance: All data complies with GDPR and PECR regulations, ensuring ethical and legal marketing practices.
• Advanced Profiling: Use propensity scoring and detailed profiling to prioritise audiences with the highest likelihood of engagement.

Comparison with Alternatives

Unlike fragmented data solutions, Solus consolidates high-quality data from multiple sources into one cohesive solution. For marketing directors and business owners, this means no more juggling between disparate datasets or managing complex integrations. Solus simplifies operations by providing a unified view of critical insights, enabling quicker decision-making, reducing data silos, and fostering more coherent and impactful campaigns. Eliminating inefficiencies and reducing costs whilst ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.

Feature	Solus	Other Solutions
Data Variety	B2B, fleet, and B2C	Typically limited to one category
Privacy Compliance	Fully compliant	Varies
Flexibility	API & tailored feeds	Limited integration
Pricing	Affordable maintenance fee for updates and compliance, pay-per-use for campaign data	High cost for access to full files

 

Quality Assurance

Solus stands out with its unwavering commitment to quality:

• All data complies with GDPR and PECR regulations.
• Email marketing adheres to strict opt-in and legitimate interest guidelines, reducing compliance risks for businesses and building greater trust with customers. By ensuring communications align with legal standards, Solus helps protect your brand’s reputation while fostering more reliable and transparent relationships with your audience.
• Anonymised data is refreshed regularly to ensure accuracy.
• Transparent privacy statements provide added confidence for campaign compliance.

How to Get Started

Embarking on your Solus journey is straightforward:

1. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss your unique needs.
2. Receive a bespoke data strategy aligned with your goals.
3. Transform your marketing with Solus.

FAQs

Q: Is the data GDPR-compliant?
A: Absolutely. All data provided through Solus adheres to GDPR and PECR regulations and is obtained with explicit consent.

Q: Can Solus integrate with existing systems?
A: Yes. Our intuitive API ensures seamless integration with your current workflows, making the process hassle-free.

Vision and Future Plans

We always strive to innovate within the world of direct marketing, for Solus our vision is to continually enhance our solution to stay at the forefront of data-driven marketing. Future updates will include expanded data sources, audience insights, and tools for real-time campaign optimisation.

Experience the Solus Difference

Free your team from the spider web of fragmented data and spending valuable time juggling multiple data sources? With Solus, you gain a unified solution that simplifies data access, reduces time spent on processing, and ensures compliance without extra hassle. Plus, you only pay for the data you use, saving costs while keeping your marketing activity focused and efficient.

Imagine having everything you need in one place: actionable insights, customisable profiles, and the tools to turn your strategy into success. Let’s work together to transform your approach to marketing.

Contact us today for a free consultation and see how Solus can revolutionise your marketing in 2025 and beyond.

In today’s competitive market, the success of your outbound marketing campaigns hinges on accurate, high-quality data. Business118 is your trusted partner for driving growth with unmatched data precision and insights, making it the ideal choice for your B2B marketing needs.

1. Data Quality and Accuracy

We understand that successful outbound marketing campaigns rely on data that’s clean, targeted, and accurate. Processing over 16 million B2B records monthly, Business118 ensures you have access to reliable, up-to-date information through rigorous validation and cleansing processes.

Our commitment to quality guarantees:

95% email deliverability, with a 1-1 replacement policy for more than 5% hard bounces and a 10% allowance for soft bounces. This ensures your email campaigns reach the right audience with minimal wasted effort and cost, maximising your ROI.
95% mailing deliverability and telephone connectivity rates. As a sales led marketing business, we know how vital it is for you to be able to have more meaningful connections with your prospects, reducing wasted resources and improving campaign efficiency.

This translates into significant cost savings and improved campaign effectiveness, setting a solid foundation for your sales and B2B marketing activities.

2. Unlock Deeper Insights to Drive Smarter Marketing Decisions

Many B2B databases provide basic contact information like names, addresses, and industries. Business118 goes far beyond the basics, offering rich insights into financial and operational data, crucial for successful data marketing campaigns.

Key Features:

Financial Segmentation: Identify your target audience with over 100 financial variables, including export activity, taxation, profit and loss, business structure, and shareholding. This deeper understanding allows you to craft highly targeted marketing messages that resonate with your audience’s specific needs, improving conversion rates and driving more effective engagement.

Business Health Targeting: Focus on financially stable companies and avoid those with high insolvency risk. By targeting healthier companies, you can reduce churn, build long-term relationships, and improve the lifetime value of your customer base, ensuring a more stable and profitable client portfolio.

Growth Potential Focus: Prioritise companies with strong business health ratings and proven growth indicators to target high-value prospects that align with your business objectives.

Diverse Data Points: Beyond financials, Business118 provides insights into company aims, premises size, energy efficiency, vehicle usage, telecoms, IT adoption, and more—empowering informed decision-making in B2B marketing campaigns.

3. Supporting Businesses of All Sizes

Unlike many data providers that impose high minimum order values, Business118 supports businesses of all sizes. For example, a small digital marketing agency leveraged our flexible pricing to access a targeted mailing list B2B campaign within their budget. This helped them identify and convert high-value leads, ultimately increasing their client base by 30% in just six months. Our tailored data packages ensure that businesses of all sizes can access the insights needed to grow effectively. This ensures that no company is priced out of accessing the B2B data insights needed to grow their business effectively.

4. Driving Sales and Revenue Growth

Business118’s enhanced data empowers you to achieve significant sales and revenue growth. By leveraging our financial insights and detailed company profiles, you can:

Identify new market opportunities: For instance, a tech company used Business118 data to identify an emerging sector with high growth potential in renewable energy. By analysing financial performance and market trends, they tailored their outreach to key players in the sector, resulting in a 25% increase in new business leads within a year.

Forecast trends: Use financial data to predict market trends and set realistic sales targets.

Optimise pricing and terms: Adjust pricing and payment terms based on a company’s financial health to maximise profitability.

Focus on high-value accounts: Prioritise companies with strong financial stability to maximise return on investment.

Improve sales planning: Use data-driven insights for accurate revenue projections and better resource allocation.

With these tools, Business118 ensures that your mailing lists B2B, telemarketing lists B2B, and email lists B2B efforts are optimised for success.

5. Data Quality and Efficiency

While standalone credit-based files offer valuable insights, they are often optimised for risk management rather than marketing. Risk management data tends to prioritise creditworthiness metrics but may lack updated contact information or details relevant to targeting prospects effectively. Business118 bridges this gap by enriching and validating data for marketing purposes, ensuring it includes accurate email addresses, phone numbers, and segmentation details. This actionable, marketing-ready information allows businesses to connect with the right audience, maximise campaign efficiency, and achieve higher return on investment. Each month, we:

– Validate and cleanse over 100,000 telephone numbers.
– Clean and verify over 700,000 email addresses.
– Perform full PAF (Postcode Address File) validation on the entire database.
– Apply suppression services (TPS, CTPS, MPS, and Royal Mail Gone Away).
– Continuously integrate new data sources to improve accuracy.

These efforts ensure significantly higher contact rates and campaign performance, maximising your marketing return on investment with accurate B2B marketing lists and data lists tailored to your needs.

6. Ensuring Accuracy and Compliance with GDPR Standards

Business118 is fully GDPR compliant and adheres to the highest standards of data privacy and security. Our rigorous validation processes ensure that all data is collected, processed, and used in compliance with regulations. This provides peace of mind, safeguarding your business from potential legal and reputational risks while ensuring your B2B marketing campaigns remain compliant.

Ready to Drive Growth?

Let’s explore how Business118 can support your business goals. Whether you’re looking to refine your B2B marketing strategy or explore how accurate, actionable data can help drive your growth, we’re here to support you.

Get in touch with us today to discuss your unique needs and discover how we can help drive your business forward.

It’s that time of year to get ahead of your hospitality competitors so you can finish the year with a bang! To support, you we are opening Santa’s sack now early with an early present of a special deal to get the bookings coming in from local businesses.

A structured marketing program spread over 4 months to get your venue to the top of their Wishlist, we provide the data and the emailing to 10,000 of your local businesses increasing your Christmas offers’ exposure – All with a 29% discount at £500+Vat/PCM.

In addition, you can choose to couple this activity to support your Social Media Activity, where we will provide the details of these 10,000 local businesses and upload it to your Instagram/Facebook account to create a customer audience for you to send them your social media Ad’s too. The best part is this little stocking filler comes with a huge 61% discount at £250+Vat.

A limited numbers offer with a first come first served for each local area – Reserve your area today by completing the contact us form or calling on 0330 043 7051

Business118 and Driven Marketing Services build, manage and enhance contact details for every UK business. To see more about our Business118 database click HERE

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, data is the cornerstone of success. Organisations are constantly seeking ways to harness the potential of their data to identify new opportunities, optimize processes, and drive growth. One powerful tool that has recently re-emerged on this data-driven journey is the Data Audit.  In the past ‘cross matching’ your data against known databases either demographically or with lifestyle variables provided a rich source of marketing intelligence, harnessed by direct marketers for decades. But in more recent ‘Dark Ages’ it has been lost due to business failure and perceived restrictions from data compliance.  People have told me for some years now that ‘you can’t do this or that anymore because of GDPR’ but when the dragon of data compliance and privacy raises its head, the White Knight steps forward with an ‘Excalibur’ of a weapon and the Dragon can be slain using the Principle of ‘Consent’.   Which is how the legislation was conceived in the first place.

I had thought that this valuable weapon was lost both because I thought it was unlikely that there would ever be sufficient ‘consented’ data to enable the appending of discriminator variables in a large enough volume to make the process worthwhile.  The magic words ‘consented for 3^rd party use’ means that for whatever reason people had agreed to their data being shared.  In the past there had been ‘competition or prize winning’ data that I never regarded with  much respect as people would give secondary or false data to get to a possible prize.  So imagine how surprised I was to discover that the data menu for this consented data shows over 26million validated consumer records and over 9m email addresses available for email campaigns.  Far from dead the free data audit is potentially alive and kicking.  The data has been sourced legitimately where the providers have been happy to give and to share their personal data and are potentially reaping the benefits of targeted special offers.

On the B2B side it was never in doubt and major financial data bases such as Red Flag Alert have been patiently collecting new variables and adding to rich data  sources such as companies house.  As ‘layers’ of intelligence are added and new interpretations such as ‘Growth Scores’ derived, B2B marketing was always likely especially as ‘incorporated’ entities (limited companies and Plc’s largely) are exempted from the need for ‘consent’ via the still in existence Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulation 2003 (PECR 2003).

How to unlock the power of a Data Audit and accelerate marketing budgets

In this article, we’ll explore and re-introduce the benefits of a FREE Data Audit, particularly when it comes to cross-matching characteristics with a multifaceted database to spot potential look-alike prospective customers.

A free data audit is a systematic process that involves analysing your existing data to gain insights into its quality, accuracy, and potential. This comprehensive assessment helps you identify data gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities for improvement. By understanding the state of your data, you can make informed decisions and devise strategies that align with your business goals.

Spotting Look-Alike Prospective Customers: The Game Changer

One of the most intriguing applications of a free data audit is its ability to uncover look-alike prospective customers. A “look-alike” or “similar audience” refers to a group of individuals who share common characteristics with your existing customer base. By identifying these characteristics and cross-matching them with a database containing multiple variables, you can effectively pinpoint potential customers who exhibit similar behaviours and traits.

Benefits at a Glance

1. Precision Targeting: A free data audit empowers you with a deep understanding of your current customer base. This knowledge allows you to define specific attributes, preferences, and behaviours that characterize your ideal customers. By cross-matching these characteristics with a broader dataset, you can fine-tune your targeting strategies and focus your efforts on individuals who are more likely to convert. This not only will affect your direct marketing but it will also affect all of your marketing and branding as you know more about your customers and what will be attractive to them.  The first principle of my Customer Farming Process or as some would have it ‘Nurturing’ is ‘To Know Thy Flock’ a better and fuller understanding of your customers will inform many decisions.

 

2. Cost Efficiency: When you identify look-alike prospective customers through a data audit, your marketing campaigns become more efficient. By tailoring your messaging and promotions to a highly targeted audience, you reduce wastage and allocate resources more effectively. This, in turn, optimizes your marketing budget and boosts your return on investment. Stage 8 of the 9 stage Customer Farming process is to ‘Reap what you Sow’ and that is all about getting the best return from a Customer Recruitment budget.

 

3. Personalized Engagement: Armed with insights from the data audit, you can create personalized and relevant experiences for your prospective customers. Tailoring your interactions based on shared attributes enhances engagement and fosters a deeper connection with your brand. This personal touch often leads to higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty. Stage 3 is ‘Search for Prize Pedigree’, all about identifying the 20% of your customer base that deliver 80% of the revenue.

 

4. Rapid Growth Opportunities: Identifying look-alike prospective customers enables you to tap into untapped markets quickly. By leveraging the common characteristics shared between your existing customers and the look-alike audience, you can expand your reach and capture new segments, driving rapid business growth. Stage 5 Of Customer Farming, ‘Pedigree Breeding’ recruiting more of your best customers not just customer recruitment per se but is the intelligence from the audit that with inform that.

 

5. Strategic Decision-Making: A free data audit provides you with valuable insights that extend beyond marketing. The information gleaned from the audit can influence various aspects of your business, from product development to customer service. Informed decisions based on accurate data pave the way for long-term success. I recall at Vernons Pools in the early 1990’s that we spotted from a Customer Data Audit that as high percentage of our customers were pet owners, at the time we blandly leveraged our direct mailing programme selling ‘insert slots’ in our mailings to customers.  With this new intelligence we approached one of our insurance partners ‘Churchill’ and together launch a Pet Insurance product that was new to us both but that delivered a valuable new and incremental revenue.

 

In conclusion, a free data audit is a potent tool that unlocks a treasure trove of opportunities for businesses seeking to uncover look-alike prospective customers and generally improve the efficiency of their marketing often the biggest single expense. By cross-matching characteristics with a diverse database of variables, you can enhance your targeting strategies, optimize resource allocation, and propel your growth journey. Embrace the power of a free data audit today, and watch as your business reaches new heights through precision, efficiency, and personalized engagement.

Remember, Driven Marketing Solutions is here to guide you through the intricacies of data audits and help you harness the true potential of your data. Contact us today to embark on a data-driven journey that will reshape the way you do business.

Driven marketing has specialised is gathering and processing streams of data in the fleet and transport sector.  Regular patrons include the car marques, vehicle service businesses like Tyrenet and numerous other businesses looking to sell their products or service to vehicle related businesses.  Building a fleet database is not as simple as one might think, there are numerous sources of data but to be effective the data has to be granular and include a wide range of contact points and channels of communication.

One of the key influences on success in direct marketing is understanding the needs of the customers and what we refer to as a ‘back to the floor’ approach.  It is only by understanding  what marketing and sales people are trying to do that helps to shape what and how to capture data to provide the intelligence needed to fulfil marketing’s objectives .  Equally, the Data Subjects on the file might seek to avoid being included in such a database if the contacts that are landing on their desks are a waste of time.  Successful fleet marketing is very much a symbiotic relationship with all parties and that makes it in everybody’s interest to ensure that the data is current and accurate.  Part of the ‘back to the floor’ approach is getting involved in the projects and objectives that the users of the data have and then advising the client how best to use the data or what key data fields might help them achieve their goal more quickly.  Driven Marketing’s Fleet File is the outcome from years of partnerships, negotiation and sheer hard work.

Vehicle type or fleet size by vehicle is a typical request knowing that a fleet manager has a certain number of vehicles is one thing but then having the overlays of the vehicle type e.g. trucks, vans of cars can be crucial to many campaigns.

Our advice is to think very carefully about who you want to engage and ask yourself some key questions before you buy any data:

What are the job roles of the people you want to target in your fleet marketing?

What are the ideal job roles of the people we want to talk to?- a lot of products or services are bought at shop floor or workshop level and so it will be wasteful targeting the FD or MD, who may indeed be party to the decision but they may not be the driver of it.  Classically, there are 5 or 6 roles in what is known as the ‘Decision Making Unit’ (DMU), the term that marketing or business studies students may have come across.  Driven MS have tried to address all of them by making the database rich with contact information and job roles.

1. Buyer; Typically and the most obvious would be the ‘buyer’  and in the fleet world that is often the fleet manager. This is the person who has the need for the product or service.
2. Gatekeeper; Before you can access the fleet manager he or she may have a number of people who could be in between you and the Buyer. These roles can include receptionists, assistants, secretaries and so you may be contact them before you get your chance with the buyer.
3. Influencer; Some of the roles could be fulfilled by the same person, so a gatekeeper could be an influencer but equally the boss, owner or senior person could wield great influence over who or what is acquired. A good database will capture as many different roles as needed in order to provide the opportunity to appeal to as many people or roles as possible to be able to be effective.  Sometimes the user is also the biggest influencer as they may well decide that they do or don’t want to use a particular product and that pretty well establishes the precedent.
4. Decider;  A decider could also be the buyer, usually, the ‘Budget holder’ too and some writers give this person a role in its own right and I suspect that we have all experienced the person from finance fulfilling that role and saying NO!
5. User; The user, as mentioned earlier, is probably the biggest influencer too they provide the vital feedback on the product quality and ability of your product to fulfil the needs of the business.

 

What about the size of the business or the type or category of vehicles they operate with?

A good fleet database will also breakdown the various businesses and contact details by size, usually employee headcount and turnover, also geography so for example it is easier to identify all of the tyre dealers in a particular region or fleet operators with more than 100 employees and so on.  One new addition to the Fleet Database is the ‘Growth score’ which indicates which businesses are growing and therefore need to buy more.

The Driven Marketing fleet database is a specialist data set that was the foundation of the now much larger  Business 118 database created by Rob Watson who had worked on numerous projects focussed on the fleet sector.  “I had experienced the frustration of not being able to find what was needed in the fleet sector and poor data meant that a lot of people were wasting their marketing budget, so I set about creating and maintaining a more reliable source of data for the road transport sector and thanks to repeat business from a number of users, we have continued to grow it and maintain it.  Thankfully for us and the sector, it was one of the least hit sectors as a result of the Pandemic many data providers went out of business and often the Business to Business data sector suffered a big drop in data quality as generally businesses closed and people moved on,” he added.

Following a decline in response rates and seeing a general decline in marketing performance, businesses need to look at their data quality.  To help businesses update their data after experiencing such significant changes post Pandemic and Brexit, Driven Marketing have established a service to validate client databases by cross matching them with the base file of 206,000 businesses that run company vehicles  to identify inaccurate or missing data and to append or add in the missing information.

To find out more contact Rob and his team and ask for the ‘data audit’ service.

 

 

The old saying  ‘you can’t see the wood for the trees’ is a phrase that can be used to describe the collection and use of data in B2B marketing.  Many businesses that we work with start by telling us they have a database but can’t tell us what is on it, don’t trust their data or know that it is hopelessly out of date.  We also often encounter ‘we are setting up a CRM system’ or ‘we have bought a CRM tool but not yet got it working yet’.  The latter response seems to be an ongoing excuse for inactivity, the will is there but the day to day, just makes it hard to achieve.  Knowing your customers and anything and everything about them is probably the most important piece of knowledge a management team should have. Systematically gathering data and producing intelligence is the job of everybody in the business.

Database maintenance is essential but it isn’t hard to do

The truth is often described in another well known saying, ‘rubbish in and rubbish out’ and the failure to have an accurate view of your customers could get in the way of your marketing and selling activity.  We know better than most that maintaining a quality database requires a lot of effort and that is required across all media.  Traditionally, tele-marketing and directory records created and maintained a reasonable standard of business data but in recent years with the Pandemic and now with fears of recession, who will invest valuable time and effort into what is seen as a maintenance job that has become hopelessly out of date and no longer one of the key assets of the business?

In difficult times it is often the agile who survive and prosper and being able to take a view from a different angle could well be the answer in the coming months and years in the face of a predicted recession.  We all have heard stories about successes in the Pandemic and in spite of the general perception of failure and difficulty, some businesses did really well, most mail order businesses for example more than tripled their revenues.  There is of course, good fortune and lady luck but some people revert to science and safety and to know who is doing well, which sectors are succeeding to target or which members of an existing customer base have rising incomes, bigger budgets to spend.  Comparatively, also not to waste time on the ones that are or will be strapped for cash and forced to cut back or worse.

Turning business risk scores on their head and creating ‘business growth scores’

Notably, working with Red Flag Alert for a number of years has conditioned most of the users of their financial data to think risk, safety and protection.  Largely, the data used in the past was designed to spot risks and failure and by its very definition, see the Red Flags that indicate caution when doing business with other businesses.  The latest tool or overlay on the Business 118 database is the converse of Red Flag’s risk data and using the same data set is able to identify the businesses that are projected to be likely to grow in spite of recession.  Growing businesses buy more products and services and employ more people, so to focus marketing effort in their direction has to be the better option.  An audit of your B2B database will help to identify its weaknesses and standards of hygiene (we can do that quickly and easily) but a growth score overlay could identify the hidden treasures from the businesses you already know and add prospective customers to your prospect pipeline or lead funnel, that you ought to know as they are likely to be the successes of the future and hopefully using that data well you will be one of them.

There are new sources of data, applications and analysis of information being added to the Business118 files all of the time and getting science on your side and deploying the business ‘intelligence services’ to help your marketing and your foot soldiers or sales people, has to be a smart move in the face of tough times.

Business118 data audit services can be FREE and quickly established, data overlays and crossmatching too is not a lengthy process to contact  enquiries@business118.co.uk

 

Unlike B2C marketing there are numerous data variables available for B2B marketing to choose from.  When I first studied for a marketing degree in the late 70’s I was introduced to a subject called ‘sources of statistics’ and with it the fact that business data was captured by various Government departments and it then all seemed very structured and simple.  Businesses had to register a Standard Industrial classification code (SIC code) when they set up, as they do now and has to submit a number of performance statistics as part of their annual filing but these days there is so much more data available and so many new sources too.  What would appear to be a simple task of appending new streams of data to existing data has become a task that is undertaken by a Data Scientist and the very process of matching business data is a skill as well as a process.  Knowing how to create match keys to avoid the complexities of mis heard consonants or duplicated letters in names that may contain for example a double S is one of the many tricks of the trade.  Data capture and processing is very much still reliant on the spoken work albeit these days thankfully, the hand written content is largely gone from modern data capture.

The advantages of working with new data sources

The exciting part of B2B data driven marketing today,  are the many new data overlays and processing that is done to establish propensity modelling for things like energy use.

Working with a major financial and credit scoring partner has been an eye opener in the sense that, they have negotiated to be able to use a number of additional data streams that are generally not accessible.  Their data is primarily used for financial purposes but in conjunction with other more traditional marketing contact information, there are many new possibilities to help refine a data search to better identify suitable target prospects for future business.

The key components or variables that usually determine a prospect file include the following:

• Industry Sectors (SIC)
• Contact Type
• Geographic Location
• Site Type, Size and Usage
• Size of Organsiation
• In-depth financial breakdowns
• Telecoms requirement
• Energy Usage
• Fleet Usage
• Business Health Score

Data appending, cross matching and building a prospect file

Processing and using data in this way alongside digital marketing techniques is very similar to military intelligence activity relying on known  information and building up a picture to help establish a marketing campaign to fulfil the objectives of the business.  The process is very similar in its construction as  the Intelligence cycle used by the military throughout the world consists of the following stages: direction; collection; collation; interpretation and dissemination.  A marketing director or manager can review and refine their data needs to fill intelligence gaps and that may include appending data variables to an existing database by cross matching existing customer and prospect data  from our databases.  The objective is to find businesses where we hold information  that they don’t so we can add it or appending it.  Much like looking up a telephone number in a directory except we hold directories of vary many variables from email addresses to mobile phone number to branch or HQ addresses.

We can then report on the quality of a database ( data audit) before we go to perhaps correct or enhance what they already hold or supply data about ‘look-alikes’ from them to target in future.

To see find out how we then use that data see our article about digital marketing.