Business cards, notes written hastily on scrap paper, invoices to first time customers, delivery tickets and 100 other places offer up valuable information that you need to be storing in an organized format. The good news is there’s a mountain of data to be had without looking very far for it. The bad news is there’s a mountain of data to be had without looking very far for it! Somebody’s gotta sit down and type all that gold into something that resembles a database; something we can access over and over again, run filters against it, and use the data for targeted marketing campaigns.

Oops! There’s those big words again. Targeted-Marketing-Campaign. Not to worry though because if you don’t have a healthy database to begin the process there won’t be any targeting going on and there definitely won’t be anything that resembles a campaign. Those are the easy parts anyway. It’s that blasted database that gives people fits.

• No one wants to own the input task.
• No one knows or wants to tackle the chore of mining that data.
• No one really has much of a clue what program to use for it, so we default to Excel.

Yeah, we know who you are. You’ve got your company’s future in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere if you could only find it. This is no way to run a business. Let’s do this, and all you need to successfully run this marketing program is a C+ average 12-year old.  We can lease you one  of those if you don’t have your own.

We’ll set up a simple, hosted software program to hold all of your contact information. Hosted means it’s on a server on the internet so you can access it from any internet connection 24/7. No one can access it except you and whoever you want authorized to do so, like your sales staff perhaps.

Next step, we have people that can input your initial and on-going data for you, for a small fee of course. How much? About the same as you were willing to pay your own employees to do it. You know, the ones you couldn’t get to do it, remember?

We can keep whatever type of data you want to in the database. Contact and mailing data, purchase histories, personal preferences, etc. Then we can segment that data by any of those fields so that when you need to run a campaign to move some cases of imported cheese you we can determine who to target by the variables we have in the database. Make sense? And we’ll do all that for you unless you just want to.

You can give access to your data to your various partners or vendors if you like. Or, create your own lists and file them in our online document management program and allow access to that for simple download. We’ve got an answer that’ll work for every, “yeah, but..” you can come up with!

Next post I’ll tell you a little more about how we can link the db program to our online marketing program and how the two can work with each other to make you more money!

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• How To Legally Buy An Email Address List (Dallas, TX)

Phillip Crum is the Chief Idea Officer of MarketingMeasure located at 2414 Arbuckle Court Dallas, TX 75229, and is committed to the idea of helping small business owners do a better job of finding their next customer or client. He and his two sons,Tyler and Preston, also own a Sir Speedy Printing franchise and employ those additional capabilities in the overall marketing services menu of offerings. Phillip can be reached at 214-213-7445, or pcrum@MarketingMeasure.com.