Targeting a Territory

Lots of marketing is still geographically targeted in B2B - face to face events, breakfast seminars, local references, or field events for a particular territory to fill up that field team's sales pipeline. Let's take a quick look at how to target a territory with a Contact Filter.

The first step is creating your Contact Filter - under the "Contacts" tab, choose "New Contact Filter" from the top menu. You've probably done this before, but the piece that some know about, and some don't is the "in" condition. This evaluates whether a particular field value is "in" a list of values. I think that this was one of the most common requests I heard at a number of Eloqua user groups, as prior to this, the only way to do it was with many individual criteria... not a great solution, we readily admitted.

So choose "Country" is "in" as a filter criteria, for example, and let's pull together a group of Contacts in South-East Asia. Click on the List, and it will pop up a list editing interface where you can add your list of countries.

It's easy to see why data quality is absolutely critical in managing your marketing database, as you can see I've built this filter assuming the data on country is not normalized, and a list of 10 countries quickly becomes a lot longer with over 30 different ways of writing their names (and this is by no means exhaustive).

(See my post on data normalization here http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html or the need for a Contact Washing Machine here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/contact-washing-machine.html for more on that... it's a common topic for me)

Once you've created this filter, save it, and you can start seeing results. Pop open the Contact Filter Dashboard, and you can see that it is capturing the right group of Contacts. Contact Filters can be used in targeting email lists, routing leads, scoring leads, or analyzing your database, so having a quick way to define a territory up your sleeve is always handy.

Comments welcome as always, I look forward to hearing about how you're using territories in your marketing efforts.