Over the years, marketing in the B2B sector has come a long way, especially when it comes to personalisation and hyper-relevant communication. Although personalisation tools have been at marketers’ disposal for years, not every marketer is reaching out the right prospects with the right message at the right time. This is where data comes into play, giving contextual insights about the prospects and customers.
If you look close, modern B2B marketers need to be part data doctors. A doctor diagnoses based on the symptoms and then prescribes the medicine. The doctor deciphers the symptoms such as temperature, blood pressure, cough, pain etc. before matching with the right medicine.
A marketer is no different. They need to learn about the customer needs and match it with the right solution and message. The better the needs are understood, the more effective the message is, leading to improved conversions. The data holds the keys to understanding customers and their needs.
Creating customers
While data helps your measure which of the marketing campaigns are working, it is not the ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose is to create customers, from interest to investment.
There are two parts to this “
- Being able to gain insights into your prospects and customers
- Scoring your prospects based on their sales propensity
To create a long-term customer, it is never just about serving their needs. You need to be able to pick up the buying signals of your prospects, understand their behavioural patterns across and more importantly, use the insights to personalise the customer experience (CX).
Need for 360° Customer Intelligence
As data doctors, marketers need to have a 360° view of the target account. It becomes all the more important if account-based marketing is part of your marketing strategy. While most marketers know their target customers, it is almost always firmographic information such as employee headcount, annual revenue, industry, targeted job titles, etc.
And, if you are going by this information is always going to be hit or miss. With the advent of AI, marketers can now look at the intent data to understand where the customer is in their buying cycle and segment them accordingly, so that you can customise the communications accordingly. Intent data is not only useful to identify the right prospects, but also to identify potential opportunities with existing customers for upselling and cross-selling.
Ensure the quality of data
While there is no doubt about the role of data in modern-day marketing, the quality of data determines the insights you get out of it. In today’s interconnected world, if you have bad quality data, it flows across your organisation, processes and business applications. It means, marketing messages are sent to the wrong people, sales professionals waste their time trying to reach prospects who aren’t sales ready. Also, it can lead to misclassified prospect segmentation and reach out tactics.
On an average, B2B data tends to decay at 30% or more every year. Some of the companies with high job turnovers in the Silicon Valley experience contact data decay rates as high as 70% per year. Data decay can arise due to a continuous erosion or degradation of data over time due to changes in data or human errors or validation.
Therefore, regardless of how good your product is, how creative your marketing campaigns are, it may never be efficient in reaching out to the potential buyers at scale. Hence, marketers need to have a data stewardship practice in place which comprises continuous data enrichment using AI sensors, enhancement of data flow, seamless integration across your business applications ecosystem and more.
Need for continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is like compound interest, in a sense, if you invest in it you’ll see the benefits. You need to continuously invest in understanding your data to not only improve marketing relevance but also improve sales conversions.
The more qualified a lead is, when it comes to the CRM system or other salesforce automation systems, the more valuable it is for your sales team. Let’s say if your organisation’s lead conversion is at 5% per month and with the help of your data analytics, you can uncover insights that help you improve conversions by another 5% every month “ then your conversion rate would be double within a year.
To sum up, given the shared accountability of today’s marketing and sales, it is important to sure a synergy that contributes overall pipeline. Great organisations are always looking at sustainability, a marathon than a hundred-meter dash. Have an eagle’s eye on your data, and it’ll take you a long way for sure.
