Marketing Data: The 4 Types, Where UK Businesses Get It, and How to Judge Quality

Marketing data is the information a business uses to decide who to sell to, how to reach them and when. In B2B it comes in four types: firmographic data (who the company is), contact data (how to reach the people inside it), intent data (whether it might be researching a purchase) and trigger data (a dated public event that creates a need right now).

Get those questions answered accurately and your outreach works. Get any of them wrong and your salespeople spend the week calling dead numbers.

This guide covers the four types, where UK firms get them, how much is free, and how to check quality before you pay. It also gives you something no top-ranking guide on the subject publishes: how many active companies are on the UK register for seven common professions, so you can size a market before you buy a single record.

What Is Marketing Data?

Strip away the vendor language and marketing data answers three questions about a potential customer:

Who are they? Industry, size, location, age of the business. This tells you whether they fit your ideal customer at all. A pest controller wants restaurants and food manufacturers, not accountancy firms.

How do I reach them? Names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses. Fit means nothing if you can’t get through to the person who signs off suppliers.

Do they need me right now? The question almost nobody’s data answers, and the one that decides whether your call lands as helpful or as noise. A restaurant that failed its hygiene inspection on Tuesday takes a pest controller’s call on Wednesday. The same restaurant six months earlier hangs up.

Most guides to the term are written by the companies selling it, each one defining marketing data as, conveniently, the thing they sell. None of them mention that the UK government publishes some of the most valuable marketing data in the country for free. Marketing data is the go-to-market slice of business data: the same company records, contact details and public filings, put to work finding customers rather than checking credit.

Prospect Data vs Marketing Performance Data

Search “marketing data” and half the results are about analytics. They are not the same thing.

Data about prospects (this page). Who is in your market and how to reach them: company lists, firmographics (industry, size, location, age), named contacts, and trigger events such as a failed inspection or a new registration. You use it before a campaign, to decide who gets the message. This is the kind of marketing data you buy, compile from registers, or request as a sample. Everything below is about this meaning.

Data from campaigns (not covered here). What happened after you marketed: website sessions in GA4, ad platform clicks and conversions, email open rates, CRM pipeline reports. You use it after a campaign, to decide what to do more of. If that is what you need, Google’s own Analytics Help Centre is the better starting point.

The 4 Types of Marketing Data That Matter

Vendor taxonomies list five, six, sometimes seven types of marketing data. For a UK business with a small sales team, four matter. Here they are, in order of how fast they go stale.

Firmographic data

Who the business is: industry, headcount, revenue, location, incorporation date. It is the B2B equivalent of demographics and the foundation of every campaign, because it defines fit. It is also the most commoditised type. Much of it sits in public registers, which matters when someone tries to charge you a premium for it.

Contact data

How to reach the people inside the business: names, job titles, direct phones, email addresses. This is what most people picture when they hear “marketing data”, and it is the most fragile. People change jobs, numbers get reassigned, inboxes get abandoned. A contact record is a snapshot of a moving target.

Intent data

What companies are researching online (topics they read about, comparison pages they visit), used to infer that a purchase might be coming. It is probabilistic: a signal that someone at the company might be interested. It is mostly priced for enterprises and bundled into large platforms, and in our experience its coverage of UK trade sectors is thin. If your buyers run restaurants and care homes, intent data barely sees them.

Trigger data

A documented public event that creates a commercial need right now: a restaurant rated 0 to 2 on food hygiene, a new care provider registering with the CQC, a new director appointment, a planning application. A trigger isn’t a guess. It is public record, with a date on it, and much of it is free. We’ve written a full comparison of signal data versus intent data if you want the detail.

Technographic data (the software a company runs) is the type you will see in vendor lists that we have left out. It matters for SaaS sellers; for UK trade-sector SMEs it is marginal.

The four types aren’t competitors. Firmographics define who fits, contact data makes them reachable, and triggers tell you which of them to call this week. The businesses that waste the least money on marketing data are the ones that stop expecting one type to do all three jobs.

Where UK Businesses Actually Get Marketing Data

There are four routes, and most SMEs only ever hear about the first two.

Route 1: Buy a list from a broker. UK list brokers sell static CSVs, typically £275 to £350 per thousand records according to RD Marketing, filtered by industry and location. Accurate at the moment of purchase, decaying from that point on, and usually sold to several of your competitors too. If you are comparing suppliers, our guide to B2B data providers UK sets out what each price tier gets you.

Route 2: Subscribe to a platform. ZoomInfo, Cognism, Apollo, Lusha and the rest: continuously refreshed databases with search tools on top. The good ones are genuinely good, and priced for sales teams of ten or more. For a two-person sales team, an annual platform contract is hard to justify, and UK coverage of niche trade sectors is thinner than the demo suggests.

Route 3: Use public registers. The route comparison articles never mention, because nobody earns a commission on it. The UK government publishes machine-readable data on every registered company, every food business inspection and every care provider, most of it free and updated daily or monthly. It is the raw material for both firmographic and trigger data.

Route 4: Compile it yourself (or have it compiled). Public data arrives as bulk files and APIs, not as a ready-to-call list. Somebody has to extract it, match it to contact details, verify it and filter it down to the businesses that fit you. That somebody can be you, a script, or a provider who does it for a fraction of platform pricing. That is the work behind our verified lead lists.

Either way, know what is in the public record before you pay anyone for data, because in our experience a good deal of what is sold starts there.

The Free Marketing Data in UK Public Records

Three sources cover most UK use cases. All are free. None need a licence fee.

Companies House. The register of every limited company in the UK. Search is free. The Free Company Data Product is a downloadable snapshot of all live companies, refreshed monthly as CSV files, with names, registered addresses, SIC codes (industry classification), incorporation dates and company status. There is a free API on top for live queries. This is firmographic data for the whole UK economy at a cost of zero, and it is the base layer of our own Companies House data products.

The Food Standards Agency. Every food business inspection rating in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is published as open data, updated daily, with a free API that needs no registration or key. For a pest controller or commercial cleaner, a restaurant rated 0 to 2 is a trigger event: that business must improve before re-inspection, and it needs help now.

The Care Quality Commission. The CQC care directory lists every registered care provider in England (locations, regulated activities, bed numbers, registration dates) and is republished at the start of each month under the Open Government Licence. A newly registered care home has to hire staff and buy equipment from a standing start, so each month’s new registrations are a dated list of businesses that need recruiters and suppliers.

Beyond those three: planning application portals (construction trades), the FCA register (financial services), Environment Agency registers, and Companies House officer appointments. Every new director is publicly filed, and in our experience new decision-makers review suppliers in their first months, which is why we track appointments as a signal in our Director Tracker.

Notice what these sources have in common. They are not just free firmographics. They are dated events: a rating issued on a date, a registration completed on a date, an appointment filed on a date. That is what makes public data the best trigger data in the country.

How Many UK Businesses Are on the Register, by Profession

Companies House lists every active UK limited company with its SIC code, so you can count a market before you buy a list. On our latest count there are 63,413 active accountancy companies (SIC 69201, 69202 and 69203) and 102,683 restaurant companies (SIC 56101 and 56102), per the Companies House advanced search. We filter the search to company_status=active, one profession’s SIC codes at a time.

Source: Companies House advanced search, active companies only. Restaurants re-counted 1 October 2026 (the restaurant list page still shows our earlier count of 101,478); other professions counted July 2026. These are limited companies only: sole traders and partnerships are not on the register, so the real number of businesses in each trade is higher. Rows overlap in places and should not be added together.

These numbers are the honest ceiling on any list for that profession: if a broker offers you more active limited-company records than the register holds, ask where the rest came from. For the full set of professions, see our UK email lists by profession.

How to Judge Marketing Data Quality Before You Pay

Marketing data has a property that catches every first-time buyer: it rots. B2B contact data decays at 22.5% to 70.3% a year, according to Landbase. Five checks filter out most bad suppliers.

1. Ask for the verification date, not the collection date. The two can be twelve months or more apart. A supplier who can’t give you a verification date for your specific segment is selling a snapshot of unknown age. The sharpest version of this question: what event generated this record, and when? A dated public event can be checked against the register yourself; a directory scrape can’t.

2. Do the decay maths. B2B databases decay at roughly 2.1% a month, according to Cleanlist, so a list compiled a year before you bought it has lost about a quarter of its accuracy before the first call. According to Landbase, 70.8% of contacts had at least one data point change in 12 months, 65.8% changed job title or function and 42.9% changed phone number.

3. Check the mobile vs landline split. A business landline listed publicly by a trade firm is low risk. Mobiles carry more PECR risk, especially where the number belongs to a sole trader rather than a company. Ask what share of the phone numbers are mobiles and whose they are.

4. Ask for the ICO registration number. A UK supplier handling personal data for marketing should hand over its ICO registration number on request. Hesitation here tells you more than the sales deck does.

5. Prefer month-to-month terms. A supplier confident in its data will give you a sample to verify and sell month to month. One that needs an annual contract before you’ve tested a single record is telling you something about its churn rate.

The real cost of bad data isn’t the list price. It is the 27.3% of sales working hours burned on inaccurate data (Landbase): calls to numbers that no longer connect and emails to people who left. These checks apply whether you are buying verified lead lists, signal subscriptions, or a one-off CSV for a campaign.

The Compliance Bit (Shorter Than You Think)

UK rules on marketing data are more workable for B2B than most owners fear, but three points matter.

Who you can email. Marketing to people at limited companies (corporate subscribers) can generally rely on legitimate interests under UK GDPR, provided the message is relevant to the person’s role. Sole traders and partnerships are treated like individuals under PECR, so emailing them cold needs consent. Any list you buy should tell you which is which.

Who is responsible. Buying a list makes you the data controller. If a complaint reaches the ICO, it lands on the business that sent the message, not the supplier that sold the data. “I bought the list” is not a defence: you are expected to have done due diligence on the supplier. You also owe each person an Article 14 privacy notice within a month of getting their data, or at first contact.

Where the data came from. Our lists are compiled from public records and licensed providers, and each record’s source can be named. Whoever you buy from, ask which of those applies to each record. The ICO’s guidance on bought-in lists expects you to check provenance before you send, and a supplier who can’t say is a supplier to skip.

Our data compliance page explains how we handle data, and our guide to compliant B2B data covers PECR and UK GDPR in depth. For small firms, the ICO’s direct marketing guidance is the plain-English source.

Which Type of Marketing Data Does Your Business Need?

Match the data to the sales problem, not the other way round.

You don’t know who’s out there. Start with firmographics. A filtered slice of the Companies House register, by SIC code, region and company age, maps your market for the cost of a download, or a small fee if you want it cleaned and enriched. The counts above show the size of the prize.

You know who fits but can’t reach them. You need contact data, and freshness is everything. Buy verified, buy recent, and buy in quantities your team can work through before it decays. That is what Verified Lead Lists are for.

You can reach them but the timing is always wrong. The most common problem and the least diagnosed. Your team isn’t bad at cold calling; it is calling businesses with no reason to switch supplier this month. That’s a trigger data problem. Find the public event that predicts demand for your service, and call the businesses that just had it. Signal subscriptions start from £150 a month.

What Our Marketing Data Costs

Our Verified Lead Lists are priced per lead by enrichment depth, with 95%+ accuracy or a free replacement, and one business day turnaround for orders under 10,000.

Monthly subscriptions are 20% off. Full details are on Verified Lead Lists, and you can start with a free 100-lead sample.

Marketing Data FAQs

What is marketing data?

Marketing data is information a business uses to decide who to market to and how. In B2B it means firmographic, contact, intent and trigger data about other companies: who fits, how to reach them, and when they need you. It is not the same as campaign analytics from GA4 or ad platforms.

Is marketing data the same as a mailing list?

No. A mailing list is one output of marketing data. Marketing data also covers firmographics, which tell you who fits, and trigger events, which tell you when to reach out. A list with no verification date is the weakest form of marketing data, because you cannot tell how much of it has already decayed.

Is it legal to buy B2B marketing data in the UK?

Yes, with conditions. People at limited companies can be emailed under PECR, relying on legitimate interests under UK GDPR. Sole traders and partnerships need consent. Buying a list makes you the controller, so check where the data came from and give an Article 14 privacy notice within a month or at first contact, as ICO guidance sets out.

Where can I get free marketing data in the UK?

Companies House offers free search, a free monthly bulk CSV of all live companies and a free API. The FSA publishes food hygiene ratings as open data, updated daily, with no API key. The CQC care directory is free and monthly under the Open Government Licence. These give firmographics and trigger events, not verified emails or mobiles.

How often does B2B data go out of date?

Quickly. B2B contact data decays at 22.5% to 70.3% a year according to Landbase, or about 2.1% a month according to Cleanlist. A list compiled a year before you buy it has lost roughly a quarter of its accuracy. Ask every supplier for the verification date of your segment, not the collection date.

What does marketing data cost in the UK?

UK list brokers typically charge £275 to £350 per 1,000 records, according to RD Marketing, and data platforms are sold as annual contracts priced for larger sales teams. Our Verified Lead Lists cost 5p, 8p or 12p per lead depending on enrichment (£50, £80 or £120 per 1,000), and you can start with a free 100-lead sample.

Most guides to marketing data end by telling you to buy a bigger database. Ours ends differently: the scarcest thing in your pipeline isn’t names. Any register can give you names. It’s knowing which twenty of those businesses need you this week, and the answer to that is sitting in public data, timestamped, waiting for whoever checks first.

If you want to see what that looks like in your sector, we’ll send you 100 free leads for your profession and area, and every record shows where it came from.