Most business-to-business marketers appear to spend 90 to 95 percent of their budgets on image, awareness, and lead generation and only 5 to 10 percent on database marketing.

I think this budgeting approach is dead wrong.

Instead, if you are new to database marketing, consider spending approximately 70 to 75 percent of your marketing budget for image, awareness and lead generation. Then spend 15 to 20 percent of your budget to fund database marketing programs designed to nurture prospects until they qualify or buy, and spend the remaining 5 to 10 percent to target existing customers for retention and sales of other products or services, upgrades, and add-ons.

Companies with mature database marketing programs—especially those that have been able to track and measure the increased sales that resulted from marketing programs aimed at their databases—often wind up budgeting less than half of their funding towards image, awareness, and lead generation programs. Why? Because they find that they don’t need to spend as much on those objectives when they are also using database marketing programs to talk directly to subsets of their market.

These mature database marketers use the other half or more of their budgets for funding marketing communications programs aimed directly at their databases of suspects, prospects and customers. These targeted, orchestrated, repetitive campaigns designed to identify and nurture prospects and talk to customers help maximize the sales opportunities they represent.