We’re living in the Big Data era, in which companies and enterprises are producing truly epic amounts of data. And not just the type of structured data that they have always collected, but also the type of unstructured data that’s been a defining feature of the social media and mobile era. This unstructured data is the type of data that’s extraordinarily difficult to break down into a series of digital 1’s and 0’s. So what types of data should B2B marketers be collecting, and why?
#1: Data that helps you segment your audience
First and most importantly, B2B marketers should be focused on collecting and analyzing any data that helps them better define the audience segments for their companies. There’s typically quantitative data that already exists about these potential customers – such as demographic data or income data – but there’s also a wealth of other day, including but not limited to, web behavior data, mobile data, social media data and CRM data.
Think about how all this data can be used to create very specific audiences and even customer personas. For example, it might be possible to see which customers are opening your email newsletters, and which ones are not. It might be possible to see which prospects are finding your corporate website through social media platforms. And it even might be possible to track other web behaviors, such as time that the prospect spends on your website. That’s powerful information that can help you find better leads and increase the chances that you’ll eventually convert that prospect into a customer.
#2: Data that helps you analyze purchase behaviors
In a best-case scenario, of course, you’d like to be able to track the effectiveness of any B2B marketing campaign by seeing how each additional interaction or piece of information helped to guide that prospect through the sales funnel. Taken together, this can help you form a very sophisticated picture of the overall B2B marketing campaign.
Maybe you find that those fact-filled whitepapers your marketing team cranked out were the single best determinant of future purchasing activity. Or, on the other hand, maybe you find out that every single lead your company collected from the brand new Facebook page was just a waste of time. Data can help you see where you should be spending your time, and where you shouldn’t
#3: Data that helps you personalize your marketing campaign
At the end of the day, a personalized marketing campaign is going to perform better than a generic, one-size-fits-all marketing campaign. If you’ve already segmented your audience and created customer personas (#1 above) and then found out what marketing triggers led to the final sale (#2 above), then it’s time to put it all together to personalize the campaign as much as possible. This might mean you are able to tailor a specific marketing message to a specific audience or customer niche.
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Unless you happen to have a lot of data scientists on your team, you’ll probably want to look at marketing analytics platforms like LiveRamp that help to break down silos within your company and connect your marketing platforms to as much data as possible. The goal of these marketing analytics solutions is to enable companies to run successful data-driven marketing strategies and solve the issues outlined in (1)(2) and (3) above.
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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.