BoldData is the European market leader in providing custom made global business information. BoldData’s dataservices are based on the largest B-to-B database of any kind in the world, providing business information to more than 300 million companies in over 240 countries. Our database is DDMA and GDPR compliant, premium database which is continuously updated by various sources such as the local Chamber of Commerces, European Union, Municipal Population Distribution Facility, Central Insolvency Register for receiverships and bankruptcies, Central Statistics Office, Market Reports, News and press releases, Publishers, Branch Organizations, Internet and deep web (Big Data). We also collect data from annual reports, telephone interviews, web research, Companies House and public filings /stock exchanges.
The main sources of B2B contact list are physical collection, the reports and records kept by a company and about them, lead magnet tools, and sometimes social media and website content.
However, marketers are becoming more and more creative each day to find optimum solutions to finding B2B contacts information of professionals.
Generally, companies do not collect B2B contact lists directly. B2B contact lists are collected by data aggregation. This is because the internal contact database kept by a company can only usually be as wide a scale as its current audience.
If the company wanted to grow this contact list it would be a time-consuming and not necessarily fruitful process to gather contact information manually. That’s why so many businesses are turning to B2B contact list providers to do this job for them. When you buy access to a B2B contact list provided by a vendor, the data will have been collected via one of the following:
Physical Data Collection of B2B contact lists
B2B contact lists can be collected from events such as conferences, trade shows etc. You will often find feedback forms at these events, which also build up the B2B contact list as does information collected through physical surveys.
Records and Reports
B2B contact lists can also be collected from government records, chamber of commerces, the companies’ revenue reports, company registries, magazine subscriptions, and similar records. While the information in these records and reports is very accurate, these sources need to be regularly updated. For instance, a company’s size or its revenue is going to change every year. Therefore, these changes need to be updated in the database as well.
Lead capture forms
work in a similar way to gated content. They’re pop-ups which appear on landing pages or the page before a purchase. Users share their email or phone number in order to get access to something they are interested in. These credentials are then added to the lists of B2B contact list. Key benefit of this method is that it allows contact data to be collected automatically over a wide range of platforms and media.
Other creative applications of lead magnet tools include offering free trials for software or services where users share their email address and other personal information to create an account. This information is then shared with data partners for data aggregation purposes.
Email campaigns also form a significant way of collecting B2B contact lists on an opt-in basis. There are also surveys where people share their data in order to be contacted in future.
A problem associated with lead magnet tools is that people can submit incorrect information during the opt-ins. However, this can be overcome by using more sophisticated lead capture forms, which are cleverly-designed to not feel like a submission of information.
Web Scraping & Social MediaWith developments in technology like natural language processing (NLP) data aggregators are now enabled to scrape the whole of internet for data of their interest. B2B contact lists can be found by listening to social media like LinkedIn or directly scraping company websites and registries.
Once data is collected from these sources, the data is supplemented with data acquired from additional research. This research adds more depth to the already-collected data, and can tell us more about customer patterns and their buying behaviour.
Generally, collecting all of this user data demands too many resources for a single company. This is why data scraping and data sharing among data aggregators is a more common method of building a B2B contact list
Further, if you are a business that needs B2B contact data but you do not have a data aggregation team, setting up one can incur huge investments in resources and time. Therefore, companies in need of B2B contact list prefer buying it directly from the data providers, who can provide this exact data effortlessly. The result? The company saves money, time, and precious man-hours which can be directed elsewhere.
