The growing adoption of mobile devices and AI, coupled with the digital evolution, has led to a sharp increase in data collection, storage, and usage in recent years. Using reliable and verified b2b data is one of the most effective ways of reaching your marketing campaign goals. However, some marketers are still not informed about the importance and methods of using accurate data in their campaigns. About 87% of marketers say that data is an underutilized asset.
Whether it’s email marketing, paid search campaigns, retargeting, social media advertising, or multi-channel marketing, data can be your best buddy to achieve your marketing success. According to 64% of marketing leaders, data-driven strategies are vital in today’s economy. They give you a snapshot of the buying habits, behaviors, interactions, thinking, preferences, and motivations of your prospects and customers.
B2B data helps you optimize your marketing channel performance, easily address and cater to the needs of your target audience, and take a targeted marketing approach to convert prospects into paying customers. Third parties are among the trusted and commonly used sources of B2B data. Approximately 88% of marketers use data obtained by third parties to improve their understanding of each customer.
How to Optimize Marketing Campaigns
To optimize marketing campaigns, define your audience, set clear goals, choose effective channels, create compelling content, and measure results with data analytics.
Why Should You Use Data in Marketing?
Data has quickly changed from becoming a modern marketer’s want to a need. Here are three major benefits of using data to make a difference in your marketing campaigns.
1. Consistent and personalized messaging:
Consistency is key and personalization is a must in marketing. There’s no point marketing to your most coveted prospects just once or twice. You also cannot expect improved marketing results if your content is not personalized. With intent-based data, you can easily fill the personalization gap in your marketing by providing your team with deep insights into the online behavior, triggers, interests, and buying intent of your target audience. Around 84% of customers say that it’s very important to treat them like a person, not a number, to win their business.
Since accurate B2B data can help you to expand your marketing reach across multiple communication channels and keep feeding your marketing reps with crucial prospect insights, even message consistency is taken care of. In marketing, message consistency does not mean communicating the same message on multiple channels. Data can really add value to your message consistency by enabling you to consistently communicate with your prospects on different fronts and topics with enhanced creativity.
2. Prospect segmentation and focused marketing:
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to marketing. The marketing messages you communicate should be relevant to each of the prospects you’re focusing on. It’s not wise to conveniently create a single message and send it to all of your prospects, even if you’re marketing the same product. This is why you need demographic, firmographic, technographic, behavioral, and other types of data to rightly segment your audiences and target each segment with specific, relevant messaging.
For instance, demographic data can help you focus your marketing on prospects categorized under a specific group, maybe based on gender, age, income or spending habit, occupation, ethnicity, religion, or family structure. You can leverage demographic data to market and find sufficient leads for each of your products, thus increasing your chances of reaching a higher ROI.
Image a company offers products ranging from high to low prices or standard to premium quality. It can simply use demographic data based on income to create a specific set of ads that target prospects with low to medium income and another set of ads focusing on prospects with high to ultra-high income.
3. Product promotion and development:
It’s easy to promote a new product or service when you already know what your prospects or customers are looking for, their pain points, and their needs. This also applies to new product development, not just product promotion—target audience data can help you to strategically create new products with features and value tailored to the desires and needs of your prospects or customers.
Data can also be used to create a want or need for your new offerings among target audiences. This will allow you to easily create buzz for your new offerings, thus improving your marketing ROI. Target audiences are more likely to show interest in a new offering when they understand how it can add value to them and help them overcome challenges or fulfill the purpose it was created for.
Obstacles Faced by Marketers Starved for Quality Data
Maintaining data quality is highly important to optimizing your marketing efforts. With bad data, you just cannot expect to benefit from your data-driven marketing campaign. Nearly 27% of marketers agree that they suffer 10% or more in lost revenue annually due to bad data. Also, highlighting the need for better data hygiene is this stat: close to 92% of marketers say that their CRM and CRM data are important or very important.
Here are some marketing challenges caused by the use of poor-quality B2B data.
1. Incorrect audience targeting:
You don’t want your marketers to waste their valuable marketing time targeting prospects who are not going to bring in business for your company. This mostly happens due to the lack of quality prospect data. Accurate B2B data is a powerful marketing tool that enables you to identify your target audiences and their buying triggers and also craft personalized marketing messages relevant to them.
2. Embarrassing marketing mistakes:
Using inaccurate data is an easy way to commit silly marketing errors, especially when you’re addressing your potential customers. Imagine your marketing rep mentioning the wrong job title of a prospect in a marketing email or sending an expensive eGift to the prospect’s office address when they’re working from home. You can save yourself a whole lot of marketing embarrassment by simply updating your database or feeding your marketing reps with reliable prospect data.
3. Strong churn rate:
Your email marketing campaign is likely to fail if you don’t employ updated email lists. Data hygiene is extremely critical to the success of email and most types of marketing campaigns. Sending emails or any other marketing communication/material to people who have unsubscribed you already or are no longer interested in your products will drain your time and money for nothing.
With reliable B2B data, you can easily filter out recipients who are less likely to benefit you and keep those who are more likely to respond to your marketing messages. On the other hand, insights, trends, and patterns studied from accurate prospect or customer data will help you to understand the who, why, when, what, and how of churn in your business. This will allow you to remodel your targeting strategy to retain lost customers or regain the lost attention of prospects, thus reducing your churn rate.
Hidden data factories can be as expensive as bad data. They take up a significant amount of marketing time and become an added burden to your marketing team. Why would you waste your marketing time and resources to check for data errors made by somebody else and clean up dirty data?
Hidden data factories can also put your marketers in an embarrassing situation in front of your audiences. About 57% of companies learn about dirty data from prospects or customers. Having access to clean and updated data is a great hack to deal with the hidden data factory and most of the data problems associated with it.
How to Use Data-driven Marketing
Before we jump into the top three use cases of data-driven marketing, let’s define this contemporary marketing concept. Data-driven marketing is an advanced, more powerful form of marketing that uses customer or prospect data to optimize brand communications with the intention of reaching the best possible ROI.
Data-driven marketing helps you to measure your marketing strategies in real-time and better improve them. It also helps you to tap into a new customer base and segment prospects or customers in a well-defined manner to easily target them. Furthermore, it allows you to personalize customer experience. Marketers spend approximately $6 billion on data-driven solutions annually. Furthermore, around 76% of marketers make decisions based on data analytics.
1. Convert online visitors into leads:
Who doesn’t want leads in the marketing industry? While there are several ways to capture leads, using website visitor data is among the easiest ones. Online visitor data finds critical use in implementing ABM and content marketing strategies. Website visitor trackers and similar tools can come in handy to closely know your online visitors and their browsing patterns. You can know which of your web pages online visitors are spending most of their time on and where they are bouncing off. Some tools also allow you to capture important contact information from your online visitors.
VisitorIntel is one such tool that not only lets you know who’s visiting your website but also which company they work for. It basically enables you to quickly reach or directly market to key influencers and decision makers of companies visiting your website. Importantly, you get to access the complete profile of those companies, including contact data, firmographics, and technographics, to develop targeted marketing campaigns, identify ideal accounts, and save marketing time.
2. Use location data for geo-conquesting:
Geo-conquesting is one of the key digital marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and directly target a competitor’s customers. It is based on the location data of prospects or customers and used for location-based engagement, personalization, segmentation, targeting, and analysis in marketing. It’s the best way to get your business in front of your competitor’s customers even when they are about to shop at your competitor’s brick-and-mortar or have entered your competitor’s vicinity.
For example, you can use location data to know where your competitor’s customers are in real-time. If they’re near your competitor, you can instantly send them relevant and timely ads or notifications about your own offerings, discounts, or offers. This will help you to allure them to switch to your brand or give you their business instead of your competitor. Besides geo-conquesting, location data is used for other marketing strategies such as cost per visit advertising, weather-based targeting, proximity targeting, interest-based location targeting, and online and offline behavior-based targeting.
3. Use LinkedIn data for targeted marketing:
Data-driven marketing tools like LinkedIn Insight Tag can be used to know business or professional details of your website visitors. They can be particularly beneficial for you if you run a B2B or SaaS company. Once you know the industry, company, job function, job title, and have other professional information about your website visitors, you can easily optimize your website or marketing content for them. Additionally, you can create or market products and services tailored to their business needs.
RevDriver is another tool that data-driven marketers can use to target the right people. This free Chrome extension allows you to gather important data like contact information and firmographics about your target audience not only through LinkedIn but also company websites. You simply have to visit the LinkedIn profile or website of people or companies in your target audience to collect their data. Interestingly, you can export all the data to your existing CRM or tech stack. The data can be used to create targeted ads, personalize marketing messages, make ABM more effective, and create relevant email marketing campaigns.
Final Advice
As a marketer, it’s as important for you to choose the right contact data provider as using the right data. There are some rules you need to play by when using B2B contact and company data for marketing purposes. Otherwise, you can land yourself into trouble. For example, you should always choose a data partner that adheres to standard data privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR.
Other parameters that you need to check when selecting your data partner are great value for money, excellent customer support, availability of on-demand research service, transparency in contracts, willingness to offer freebies, and of course, uncompromised data quality and coverage. Apart from these, there are more checkboxes you need to tick before signing a contract with a B2B data provider. You can know them from this 11-step reference guide to data purchasing.
