So you’ve built a respectable sized database for your SMB. Now what? How do you use your database to leverage corporate relationships and media partnerships?

A large and/or engaged database of prospects, customers and stakeholders can be an extremely powerful marketing tool if used correctly. When done right, SMBs can leverage a proprietary or network database to greatly increase their brand and marketing appeal to partners and the media.

Here are five tips to help SMBs on a limited marketing budget get significant partnership marketing traction from their database.

Tip 1: Know the hand you’re dealt: Understanding your data

Before you can begin to create an ‘affiliate’or ‘partnership’ marketing strategy, you need to start with the fundamental question: who are my contacts? This post is not going to jump into the segmentation requirements so much as to say that you need to have a deep understanding of you you are talking with. When you get to the latter stages of matching up like for like contras and other cross marketing activities, its absolutely fundamentally important that you understand the job titles, industries, geos, company size, age of data, revenues and engagement levels of your proprietary database. Why? Because then you understand the cards you’re dealt and the potential aces you have in the hole when looking to do a email-marketing cross promo, a campaign to a twitter list or a website banner exchange.

Tip 2: Get to know your contacts and develop segmented communications

You’ve got a massive database of B2B decision makers. Awesome! But.. how the heck do you find out if the contacts are receptive? Even if some do seem to react in some way (open, click, share etc) what do you do next? How do you then drill down to answer their needs? How do you go from a portion of your database which seems to regularly open/click emails, visit your site or share your content to loyal, engaged and – most importantly – paying customers?

The answer? Segmentation.

By talking to your data universe in specific, targeted, segmented ways you’ll not only create an ongoing and relevant dialogue, you’ll reach a place where you’re a source of sector-specific solutions.

Tip 3: Get active across the marketing mix

Okay, so here’s the typical scenario: You’re a small business with a few years behind you where you’ve collected a few thousand business cards, exhibited at some events giving you a few thousand more opted-in prospect contacts and then you jump on the list buy bandwagon and ‘top-up’ your contacts with a list purchase. Suddenly you have 100,000 contacts, 70% are new, unqualified purchased contacts and you need to figure out the best marketing channel to communicate with you new prospects.

So where do you focus your limited marketing resources? Email? Well, email does have a very low ‘investment per touch’, is relatively easy to coordinate and email marketing provides accessible, measurable stats. How about social? Why not invite 500 contacts from your new and enlarged databased to follow your Facebook  company page per day and, within a few months, grow a Facebook audiences of 10s of thousands? How about telemarketing campaigns? Telemarketing, while not as cheap as social marketing nor email, telemarketing campaigns offer some of the biggest returns in terms of qualification of, and engagement with, new prospects. Let’s not forget good old print! With changes to laws in Canada, for example, old-school direct marketing may well get back in vogue as SMBs vie for ways to reach their colder prospects.

There are obviously lots of ways that one can communicate with a database, each with its own merits. The recommendation of this author would be that you should try a bit of each. Understand and respect the time and cost constraints of each channel but try to at least establish your fledgling brand in each so you have the foundations in the months and years ahead to truly analysis the  ROI of your marketing activities and maximise your appeal to possible partners as a truly multi-channel vehicle of communication.

Tip 4: Play to your strengths but build for the long term

Its common to see a company form on the back of a great product/niche need and then witness it falter due to a lack of understanding of to leverage their brand’s resources.

The answer? Simple. Play to your strengths

Bought a massive database or grown a significant social following? Then shout about the reach. Proved out that purchased email database? Tell partners about the numbers of people you talk with and get business from! Got no ‘database’ of such to speak of but seem to be making headway from your direct phone outreach efforts? Then play to the fact that you have a resonance and high conversion rate! Whatever your company’s unique sales and marketing collateral, the point is that you need to make the most of the ways you unique convince end users and how that can help support the brand of potential corporate partners.

Tip 5: Source Influencers

In the world of long tail marketing there’s virtually no chance of our product either: a) being unique or b) having a mass, unrivaled appeal. That means that, when you’re trying to establish your business in the first few years you’re probably best off trying to piggy-back off the reputation of more credible personal or corporate brands.

Identifying, connecting to, and partnering with so called ‘industry influencers’ can therefore be a hugely powerful way to reach new audiences and add credibility to your own brand. By going beyond the usual following and ‘shout out’ tactics to actually speaking and collaborating with the so cold influencers can really help boost your status (and search rank) with potential customers!