Not a question you get asked every day for sure, but what's that they say about always saying yes - it leads to adventure? In this case it sure did and with a great outcome for our client too.
Background
Our client is a leading vehicle manufacturer of hearses, removal vehicles and limousines. GrowThink were commissioned to assist this client with a complete marketing improvement assessment. This was well received and lead to us supporting them for many of our recommendations.
One of these was how could the company expand beyond their current client base by improving their direct marketing campaigns.
The Question
The critical step to facilitate this was obvious - we needed a full and accurate listing of all UK funeral directors. The client's data was incomplete and aged so we looked into possible data sources.
Unfortunately purchased sources were similarly incomplete and the only real way to create this list was through hard graft. It turns out the professional data sellers quite often charge you a high price for data which isn't always complete or as accurate as you'd like!
So we asked if resource could be obtained from the client but this wasn't available so we were asked if we could create this listing. Sure we said - not knowing it'd be quite a journey.
How We Tackled It
We drew up a methodology, like that shown below, and started collating the data. We ended up offshoring some of this to keep costs and timeline manageable for our client.
Methodology for Producing the Funeral Market Data
Data was constantly changing and needed extensive checking and verification. We also strove for a level of completeness that was probably a little insane looking back, but at GrowThink we are sticklers for detail, and it has paid off. Some 7,000 records, and over 3 months hard graft later, we had our listing. The work wasn't to stop there though.
The Deliverable
Rather than purely deliver a raw data file we knew from similar work that visualisation was super important to make the data usable. As such we invested time to investigate the latest static and interactive mapping techniques.
All this boiled down to a deliverable which included the raw data ready for CRM upload, a market report on the segmentation of the industry and an interactive map of the entire UK funeral director coverage.
Here's a snippet of what we produced:
One of the data visualisations produced for the client
Client Advantage
This listing was gold dust for our client who saw the following advantages from the project:
A deep understanding of their target market which could be segmented to allow much better targeting than they could have conducted before
An interactive map that could be used as a stand alone tool or integrated into their CRM package to facilitate call-planning and effective sales activity
An accurate contacts list to facilitate marketing campaigns. Campaigns that would include new prospects that the client wasn't aware of previously
All this resulted in new profitable sales and an excellent return on their investment. But not possible without good quality data.
Next Steps
Since this initial project we've expanded the listing to double the fields per funeral director that we hold, updated it over 4 times and further enhanced our ability to visualise the data (including interactive outputs to allow multi-variant analysis that can be exported as detailed animations). We've been able to use this to help several agencies with COVID-19 planning and other analysis. We now regularly update the database and make it available to similar companies looking to grow their business.
What started with a simple question has ended up with a data set we'll continually update and a listing we're sure others can benefit from too.
If you have a similar data challenge we'll happily rise to it. Pick up the phone to Robin on +44 (0)7770 325 252 or mail us robin@growthinksolutions.com
If you're in the funeral industry and want to understand what data we hold - see file below
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