This is a guest post by entrepreneur Jason Garoutte 

It’s hard to be a marketer these days. Even when we carefully craft a message and follow best practices, 99 percent of our attempts can still fall on deaf ears. Are there any other professions where 1 percent is considered good?

I talk to Sales and Marketing leaders every day. Nobody ever says they’ve got enough pipeline. But where can they go for more? Email marketing and pay-per-click both show declining ROI, and many marketers have already invested to the point of diminishing returns. This year the answer seems to be Marketing Automation, and indeed this can add a flow of leads over time. But what if you don’t have time to wait? Today’s marketers need shortcuts through the funnel.

The good news is that shortcuts are possible, and it all comes down to smart use of data. The key skill for marketers to develop over the next two years is the ability to synthesize data. Thanks in part to the rise of social networks, companies and people share more about themselves than ever before.

In this publicly available data, there are gems that can determine targeting, messaging, and personalization. Using data like this is no different from what a good sales rep does, except that a sales rep searches manually using sources like websites and LinkedIn. Marketers need to scale this research for an audience of thousands or millions.

No matter how a marketer sources leads, a little data can propel leads through the funnel. Even if you’re not ready for “big data” tools and predictive analytics, you can still find impressive shortcuts with a bit of intuition and elbow grease.

My top tip to marketers: don’t boil the ocean. Very few marketers have access to data scientists for data mining. So don’t seek to create your own giant database — it will just go stale before you benefit. Instead, be pragmatic and look for quick wins.

Here are three ideas that work from my recent experience.

• Use data to find a specific business need

Just a few years ago, the state of the art in targeting was to select four dimensions: industry, size, geography and title. I don’t know about you, but for my company, there is no SIC code that buckets our prospects. Every business is unique, and your prospects have unique needs. So why not search for those unique needs? Forget SIC codes and look at employees titles. You can find these in job openings on websites and job boards. You can look at titles on LinkedIn and Jigsaw.

• Tailor content for “micro-segments”

Once marketers have a list of targets, it helps to sub-divide that list into “micro-segments”, or groups with a unique perspective on the product being sold. Here’s an example. Some of your prospects may already have a competing technology in use. Often there is evidence of that technology, such as the expertise of employee biographies or required skills on job postings. Some technologies, like web analytics tools, can be seen directly in JavaScript.

If you write a different story for prospects that already use your competitor, you can emphasize the benefits of swapping. It’s s a great way to establish immediacy and relevance. It also shows that you’ve done your homework. I’ve seen campaigns double response rates by taking an existing email template and tweaking it for the customers of different competitors.

• Personalize the script with relevant data

Starting an email with the recipient’s first name hardly qualifies as personalization. Real personalization shows that you know something meaningful. If the recipient doesn’t feel special, then you haven’t personalized.

A marketing automation tool, like Marketo or Eloqua, offers dynamic fields in an email to plug in information and start a true product conversation. With this precision, you can create personalized campaigns that are very relevant to each recipient. In summary, these are exciting times for marketers.

Jason Garoutte is the CMO and GM of Mintigo, which operates a demand generation platform that uses predictive analytics to help marketers find and engage prospects. Prior to joining Mintigo, he worked as a vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com. 

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Attivio, a Boston-based “big data” startup has pulled in $34 million to help customers make sense of their data — whether it’s sitting pretty in a database or is strewn haphazardly around the enterprise.

This first round of funding is led by Oak Investment Partners, a private equity firm with $8.4 billion in capital under management.

“Attivio is the only company answering both the ‘what’ and ‘why’ big data and analytics questions that swirl unanswered in board rooms, war rooms, data centers, support centers and cubicles around the world,” said Ifty Ahmed, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, in a statement. Ahmed will join the company’s board.

Companies are aware that all their potentially valuable semi-structured and unstructured data — texts, emails, Word documents, reports — is scattered. Attivio wants to integrate all that data that is siloed so companies can run queries on it.

As is often the case with enterprise startups, its early customers are primarily government agencies and financial services firms.

Ali Riaz, CEO of Attivio

According to Ali Riaz, the company’s chief executive, (pictured left) “We will utilize the funding to expand our sales and marketing efforts and, in particular, more deeply penetrate core vertical segments.”

With its boost of funding, the company will also be hiring in all areas of its operations from engineering to marketing and sales. It currently has offices in Massachusetts, Israel, Germany, and the UK.

The company was founded in 2007 by Riaz, the former president of FAST Search & Transfer, an enterprise search company that was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2008. Competitors include FAST, as well as search vendors Endeca, Autonomy and Lucid Imagination, that provide the tools for IT teams to search and analyze valuable “dark data” that is hidden within the enterprise.

Existing investors, Per-Olof Söderberg and Tenth Avenue Holdings, also participated in the round.