To keep your business thriving, you need customers, and to create customers, you need to start with an audience. There are many ways that you can grow that pool of potential leads—through having the right social media presence to thoughtful content marketing and even purchasing a list—but you need to determine if your audience consists mostly of people who could buy your product. 

Look To The Source

Where did your potential lead come from? If the person registered on your site to download a gated piece of content about your product or service, that shows a high level of interest. However, if they had their badge scanned at your trade show booth for a chance to win an iPad, their quality level drops significantly. They might be interested in your product and be a valid potential lead, but really, they probably just want a chance at that free iPad, so they’re best suited for a lead nurturing stream instead of a call from one of your business development reps right off the bat.

Strike While The Iron Is Hot

Having worked in the B2B marketing lead gen business for over a decade if not close to two decades, I know that the age of a lead is so important because calling a dated lead winds up with that person quite likely not remembering registering for a piece of content or stopping by a trade show booth if it was weeks or months ago. This also holds true when you’re evaluating the quality of your data. Look at when the person first became a lead for your company as well as the last time they took any action (clicked on an email, visited the site, etc.). Today, job changes happen all the time and if the person first visited your site more than a year ago, they may have a completely new job now that doesn’t pertain to your company or product.

Where Did You Come From?

As you’re evaluating the quality of your marketing list, consider how you received the data. Did the potential lead connect their social media profile to your registration form to download a piece of content or register for your webinar? If so, you can consider that information to be very trustworthy considering that most people use their exact name for their social media presence, especially in a professional setting like LinkedIn.

Who Are You?

The last item to look at when evaluating your audience data is the information in the data itself, especially if the data came from a registration form on your site and is entered by the potential lead. Did Kim Kardashian or Donald Duck really register for your webinar with their address being 15 Yemen Road in Yemen (and props to anyone who got that “Friends” reference), or more likely, did someone use those names and that address so they wouldn’t wind up on the other side of a sales call? Data cleansing is a very important task for anyone working with audience data, so you need to make sure it’s incorporated into your audience data evaluation.

Want more names to add to and evaluate for your own B2B audience database? PartnerDemand can help with B2B marketing campaigns that will convert! Contact us to get started today.