B2B data-driven marketing refers to the process of using data and evidence to create strategic marketing campaigns. It’s the technique of optimizing customer interactions.

With the right data, data-driven marketing can significantly impact your target audience, how you deal with them, and the content you create.

The data obtained is extremely valuable in improving your strategy, ultimately leading to greater revenue for your business.

The collection of data is just the first step. It must then be analyzed to gain insights into the behavior of the target audience. There’s so much more to data-driven marketing than just collecting and analyzing data.

It’s a mindset.

Data-driven marketing helps guide you in your decision-making process based on evidence drawn from a scientific data-driven approach.

The Importance of B2B Data-Driven Marketing

Your target audience will have subjective views on advertisements laid out in front of them. What may seem engaging to one, may not be the case for the other.

This is where B2B data-driven marketing shines. It helps you find the formula to drive strategies that are highly targeted, leading to better conversion rates.

It ensures that your marketing is hitting the right people at the right time.

Data-Driven Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is often seen as a more expensive approach. It lacks the data to understand the target audience’s behavior, oftentimes resulting in a trial-and-error approach.

Data-driven marketing provides immediate feedback, which allows you to make changes based on specific purposes.

Let us look at the key differences between the two.

Data-Driven Marketing: relies on the digital journey of the target audience to collect data.

Traditional Marketing: relies on offline activities such as in-person promotions, listening to radio, or watching TV.

Data-Driven Marketing: is based on insights from the target audience, leading to a personalized approach.

Traditional Marketing: one size fits all mass marketing.

Data-Driven Marketing: is typically outbound.

Traditional Marketing: typically, more inbound, due to its precise affinity for tactics.

What Are the Benefits of B2B Data-Driven Marketing?

There’s a lot of benefits but they all go back to getting the best return for your marketing dollars. If you can utilize data to inform your marketing choices so as to never have a negative campaign, your business will grow beyond your imagination.

Helps You Optimize Marketing Spend

Tools used in data-driven marketing allow you to identify which advertisements or efforts are not producing significant results, helping you to optimize the way you spend.

Helps You Create Relevant and Compelling Content

Having an insight into what your target audience prefers to engage with will help you deliver the right content at the right time.

Data leads to knowledge in B2B marketing. The more you know about your target audience’s behavior, the more powerful your content will be. You will understand their needs that only you can solve.

Creating content based on your potential customers’ needs will show that you have the capacity to solve their problems, ultimately addressing their needs directly.

MarketMuse, an AI-based content tool, produces detailed and in-depth contents. Their goal is to teach prospective clients on how to create and produce effective strategies for their content.

They placed references to their platform within the content, making it easier for the user to research and optimize their content against their competitors.

Helps You Identify the Best Channels for Promotion

The data collected from the tools used will help you find out which channels to use to effectively target your audience.

Let’s take a look at GoSquared. They use live chat as a marketing channel in order to better understand their target audience. This in turn helps them sort out the important and less important audience.

Helps You to Implement Personalized Marketing

The key to pursuing your target audience is to personalize your advertisements. The data drawn can be used to anticipate your target audiences’ needs and craft relevant content.

Personalization of websites can help shorten your sales cycle by focusing on each prospect’s needs.

It can be done via email campaigns using segmentation and data insertion.

The Expert Institute, a legal service platform, used personalized communication via email marketing from the Vice President of their client relations, George Cuchural.

They also refined their database to ensure that the first names of their subscribers were correct. This allowed their subscribers to feel more connected with a high-level member of their company.

By utilizing personalized email marketing, they were able to accomplish the following:

200% increase in conversions
60% open rate
20% clickthrough rate
3% conversion rate, which is much higher than the 1% rate from their regular newsletters.

Helps You to Improve the Quality of Leads

Focusing on the most important leads through the use of segmented market data and buyer personas will allow you to focus on the people who matter the most to your business.

An example of this is Simplero. They did a comprehensive market research to identify their target audience and the problems they are faced with.

Challenges in B2B Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing is a precise way to gather information from your customer’s behaviors. The challenge lies in planning and implementing strategies that will truly give successful results.

It’s important to outline these challenges so you can devise plans on how to overcome them.

Data Integration

With data coming from multiple sources, it’s easy to lose sight of what truly matters. Data collected from multiple sources may come in varying formats and may reflect inconsistencies.

This is where data cleaning comes in. It refers to the process of identifying and eliminating information that may skew the results, creating discrepancies between sources.

Making sure that your data is clean means always checking for duplicates, analyzing the logic behind it, and consistent organization of your data.

Evaluating the Right KPIs

It’s essential to have KPIs that are aligned with your goals. After all, each piece of data that you are tracking should have a purpose.

Find Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that add value to your business.

Identify business goals
Identify which data is relevant to your goals
Devise a plan to re-evaluate your KPIs
Add new KPIs or eliminate outdated ones

Keep in mind to avoid data that may seem impressive but doesn’t truly contribute to your objectives, also known as vanity metrics. B2B performance marketing gets rid of this and focuses on the metrics that matter.

Strategic Implementation

Data-driven marketing takes up a lot of time, effort, and resources. You must ensure that the right policies are in place to counteract this challenge.

In-depth planning and clear data policies will help you make the best decisions based on the most current and relevant data.

While it is true that data-driven marketing is complicated, the results are ultimately rewarding.

B2B Data-Driven Marketing Best Practices

Outline Your Objectives

Decide first what you want to achieve. Before collecting the data, make sure that your goals are clearly identified.

These goals and objectives will serve as your guide because you know exactly what information to collect, where to get it, and what insights to look for.

Gather Your Data

Once you have your goals laid out, you have to identify which information is truly necessary. Take a closer look at your objectives and choose the data that will help you create the best marketing strategy.

Collect and Organize Your Data

You have to decide which tool to use to collect and organize your data. Ensure that the data collected will set you apart from the competitors.

Track Your Progress

Make a process and routinely monitor the performance of your campaigns. This will help you analyze your actions and marketing efforts.

Tools for B2B Data-driven Marketing

Google Analytics Provides reports on actions that your target audience take on your website, including how they got there, and how your content is performing. It is going to be your #1 tool that you’ll use for web analytics and for making marketing decisions.

Conclusion

Data-driven marketing takes a lot of effort and the need to go the extra mile. Accurate data, advanced technology, relevant content, and the willingness to track your efforts are essential in data-driven marketing’s success.

If you need help figuring out how to optimize your marketing efforts, reach out to the team at Vilop Digital.