It’s easier to succeed with lead generation as a B2B marketer when you integrate data into your marketing campaigns. Data can give you greater insight into where a prospect is on the B2B buyer journey, how valuable that prospect might be later as a customer, and how likely that lead will eventually convert into a sale.
Take, for example, the set of all the prospects that are mid-way on their B2B buyer journey. They have expressed interest in your product or service, but still need quite a bit of nurturing to turn into a final sale. You may have an intuitive sense of how many of these prospects there are, as well as how to reach out to them, but data can make this process much more efficient.
First and most importantly, data can help you understand the messages that are resonating the most with customers. You can simply use data to compare and contrast the performance of different marketing campaigns. From there, it’s fairly straightforward to narrow in on what’s working, and what’s not. You can even compare the relative value of two different calls-to-action (CTAs) just by doing a little A/B testing.
Secondly, data can help you identify bottlenecks along the buyer journey. Where are buyers tending to stop and not move forward? What steps are they unwilling to take? Obviously, you need to eliminate these bottlenecks if you hope to convert leads into prospects. Often, bottlenecks occur where you least expect them.
Thirdly, data can give you real-time visibility into how many prospects you have at each stage of the customer journey. This can help you tailor your messages. If, for example, most of the prospects are at the very beginning of the customer journey, you may need to focus more on brand awareness and making these customers more informed about the value that you can offer to them. If most of the prospects are at the very end of the journey, you need to provide that last little push to convert. Data can help you devise the perfect conversion strategy.
Finally, data can provide hard evidence of which marketing campaigns actually worked. No more relying on hunches or anecdotal evidence. You just need to come up with the appropriate metrics, and data can help to tell your story. Even tracking something as simple as email open rates can provide a real clue about how well your different marketing campaigns are performing.
Of course, you can use data for more than just helping you to nurture prospects in your customer pipeline. You can use data for everything from lead scoring to projecting lifetime customer value. In fact, you may realize that you have so much data that you don’t know what to do with it all. By using the data you do have, you’ll be making your marketing operations more efficient and more likely to convert leads into sales.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.