The most important thing on marketers’ minds in 2024 is revenue growth, according to 79% of respondents in a new report featured in Search Engine Land. These same marketers also stated that lead gen and revenue growth are their biggest pain points right now – by a wide margin.

As marketers go all in on growth, which strategies offer the best chances for success? This blog is a two-part series, and this week we’re covering three under-the-radar moves we’re making with our clients now to accelerate business growth. Next time on the blog we’ll dive into two more.

• Rethink your customer acquisition mindset: Your prospect “list” is foundational to your marketing program. It’s the data that fuels one of the most essential ways you grow your business – through customer acquisition campaigns. But if this data is so important to business growth, why do so many marketers disregard it, or at the very least fail to expand it, update it, and modernize it?

Our perspective is that marketers who don’t rely upon third-party data to build intelligence on audiences outside their own are making a big mistake, especially since most of them don’t have a first-party database large enough to make a significant impact on landing new customers. That’s not the purpose of first-party databases anyway. They are intended to nurture and market to customers you already have.

On the flip side, third-party B2B acquisition data (such as our massive SMB database containing more than 95 million SMB contacts with email addresses) is purpose-built to bring in new customers.

While fears about privacy and inaccuracy around third-party data are rational, if you align with a reputable provider – one that has earned the trust of today’s top brands -- those issues are addressed as a priority. That’s why when you think about using third-party data, you’ve got to think about it in modern terms. Purchased “contact lists” are a thing of the past. They aren’t strategic and they often cause more harm than good due to poor data quality.

The modern approach is audience building, which starts with clean, fresh data (ask us about our 30-day, 95% email data validity guarantee). It involves gathering up-to-date intelligence on new audiences that map to your ideal customer profile (ICP), whether your B2B targets are SMBs, enterprise-level decision-makers, medical professionals, or someone else.

At OMI, we uncover factors like company size and reach, annual expenditures and revenue, job titles, market trends, growth information, and other data on preferences and characteristics to align the audience with your ICP – and create something that is uniquely yours. This enables you to really personalize your omni-channel customer acquisition campaigns, and ultimately, impact lead gen and business growth.

• Identify in-market prospects: There truly is no better prospect than one who is already looking for what you have to offer. Intent data is a marketer’s best friend in that regard because it uses fresh digital intent signals -- sourced from your prospects’ search queries, content downloads, and website clicks – to connect brands with real people who have already shown an interest in your products or services. As the signals are aggregated they are sorted by industry and category using natural language processing (AI). We take two approaches to intent data at OMI – probabilistic and deterministic. You can read more about the differences here.

• Connect with prospects at work and home: As the lines between our personal and professional lives are blurring, more brands and marketers want the capability to connect with B2B prospects at work and at home. They can do this using business and personal postal addresses for direct mail, and business and personal email addresses to anchor omni-channel marketing. They also want visibility into prospects’ social URLs.

This B2B2C convergence has created a new data matching movement, where personal contact data is matched to B2B data to power improved marketing reach and more personalized campaigns. Using our cutting edge data matching services, OMI can deliver high B2B2C match rates of upwards of 60% -- well beyond our competitors. This enables our clients to connect with their most promising prospects on the channels those prospects prefer across all facets of their lives.

When recently working with a leading global tech company, OMI effectively bridged the B2B and B2C worlds of our audience of prospects. For the social portion of the campaign, our match rate was 70% to LinkedIn and 42% to Meta -- which is considered exceptional. Go here to read the complete case study.

Next week we’ll cover two more under-the-radar strategies for achieving your growth goals. Reach out to us today and we can walk you through our proven strategies to drive more business growth this year and beyond.