One of the big mantras in the marketing world continues to be “big data” – especially as it relates to new data analytics packages that are able to analyze increasing amounts of marketing data and make sense of it all. But how exactly can data help to drive B2B lead generation success?
First and foremost, data analytics can help you see which marketing campaigns and promotions are actually working. You may have an intuitive feel for which ones are working, but data can help to give you an empirical basis for your decisions. You may be able to analyze data in real-time, too, which gives you the ability to make marketing decisions on the fly, rather than waiting for results to roll in at the end of every quarter. The more successful your marketing campaigns are, the more leads you will have for your sales funnel.
In a classic sales funnel, leads go in at the very top and only a few emerge at the very end (i.e. your conversions). You may have a good idea of how many leads are being poured into the very top of the funnel and a very precise idea of how many sales pop out at the very bottom, but do you have a good handle on how many leads are at various stages of the funnel? For example, are most of the leads still clustered at the very top of the funnel — or are most of them already near the very end of the funnel?
How you answer this question has important implications for how you nurture your leads. If most of your leads are at the very top, for example, most of your messaging will need to center around introducing them to your products and services. If most of them are at the very bottom, though, most of your messaging will have to focus on the last part of the B2B selling process – convincing these prospects that the ROI is worth it at the end.
You can also use data analytics to get a much better picture of who your typical customers are. In marketing parlance, this is known as creating “buyer personas.” What types of interests, behaviors or preferences do they have? Again, you may have a good anecdotal sense of who your best customers are, but data is one good way to uncover potential new prospects and customers in adjacent fields or industries. This, too, is going to help your lead generation initiatives.
Not only will you be able to acquire more customers, you will be able to retain them as well, thanks to sophisticated data analytics packages. The reason is simple: data enables you to attach a value to each customer, giving you clues about which customers you need to be checking in with from time to time. For example, you might attach a certain value to actions taken by a customer, and then use those data points to build out a model that predicts the total value of that customer over an entire lifetime. Over time, ideally, you would want to introduce that customer to higher-value products and services.
Data analytics, then, can help at every step of the B2B buyer journey. Data can help you pick out the right leads, acquire more customers, retain more customers and analyze the value of a customer over an entire lifetime. With all that data, you’ll have a much richer view into your B2B lead generation process.
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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.