After more than 20 years as founder and CEO of OMI, I’m still passionate about the work we do and enjoy describing it, especially with a new audience. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Mark Lubragge of Daily Ad Brief for “Marketing for Your Future,” a weekly video segment with media experts across the country. I gave a brief overview of our business and how we support our clients through omnichannel marketing. Here are a few highlights from the interview:

Our Mega B2B Database

I talked about OMI’s massive B2B contact database of more than 18 million businesses and 100 million contacts. OMI has the world's largest U.S.-based SMB database and it continues to grow.

Audience Mirroring

Companies today have access to huge amounts of data from their customers and prospects, but Mark pointed out that many marketers don’t know what to do with the data they collect. At OMI we can work with our clients to use their customer data to get a picture of their best customers, such as by company types, size/revenue, number of employees, etc. Using this information we can build a “mirrored” audience for acquisition campaigns. The audience mirroring process enables businesses to find customers that look like their best customers.

The Next Great Frontier

What does the future hold for marketing and third-party data? In my opinion intent monitoring will continue to grow. 

The benefit of being able to target an audience of buyers in-market for your product or service is huge. Intent monitoring lets you do just that. Intent insights are collected from monitoring companies’ online actions -- from search queries and website clicks to downloading a white paper. From there, a data provider (like OMI) can combine intent data with prospect contact data to identify the individual most likely connected to those actions. Going forward, I think more companies will take advantage of this approach to find new customers.

Keeping Data Accurate

Mark also asked me about the biggest challenge for our business. My response? Keeping our data accurate.

At OMI we are data quality obsessed, but that’s not to say it’s easy. We work vigilantly to keep our data up to date, and that task has been increasingly difficult. We specialize in SMB data, but small businesses have taken the brunt of recent economic challenges. With all that in mind, SMBs still represent a major opportunity for business growth. If you’re looking to target them, you need to ensure you’re using quality acquisition data.

You can watch the full interview here.

It was an honor to be a guest on “Marketing for Your Future” and I want to thank Mark for the opportunity.

Reach out to my team today if you want to learn more about omnichannel marketing and how OMI’s SMB data can open the door to new customers.

Did you know? Over 75 million of OMI’s 100 million manager- and professional-level and above contacts are matched to the LiveRamp RampID graph, including 65 million records from our SMB and medical market databases. Contact us today to learn more about building a custom audience.