Data runs the world today. And marketing is no exception to this. 7 out of 10 marketers leverage data-driven marketing across all levels. And it’s not difficult to see why. The ton of data available at your disposal makes it way easier to understand your customers and create personalized campaigns.
Are you still relying on intuition to build your marketing strategy? Or calculating the efficiency of your marketing campaigns with limited data? If yes, you’re going to fall behind.
What is a Data-driven Marketing Strategy?
Put simply, a data-driven marketing strategy is creating effective campaigns with the help of data you’ve collected. By collecting data through different platforms and using technology to process it, you can better understand the requirements of your prospects. This helps you create unique and tailored content and deliver an engaging experience.
B2B marketers can use insights from their data to create the right message for their campaigns, identify the right channels to reach their prospects, and determine the best way to keep them engaged when they enter the sales pipeline.
Benefits of Data-driven Marketing
Data helps you make better B2B marketing decisions that drive greater results quickly. In fact, data-driven marketing statistics indicate nearly two-thirds of leading marketers say data-based decisions are superior to gut instinct.
But that’s not all. You can benefit from data-based marketing in many ways. For example,
1. Identify Your Target Audience
B2B brands usually target a niche audience. This means your products or services aren’t for everyone. Neither are your marketing campaigns. When identifying your target audience, you need to niche down as much as possible to run successful account-based marketing campaigns.
Suppose you’re marketing a performance management solution for enterprises. Now, you need to narrow down the type of businesses that can benefit from it. For example, what is their workforce strength? What is their annual revenue? Etc.
A data-driven approach simplifies this process. It helps you identify your audience, understand their challenges and reservations, create precise ICPs and buyer personas, and segment them effectively.
2. Generate and Nurture Qualified Leads
With the right ICPs, buyer personas, and market segmentation, it becomes easier to focus only on high-quality leads. Data from these leads will give you better insight into the type of content they’re interested in and where they are in the sales funnel.
You can further use lead scoring to improve the quality of leads and measure their engagement.
3. Improve User Engagement and Experience
Data-driven marketing allows you to create engaging campaigns and boost user experience. You can use data to-
- Understand the type of content your customers want and through what medium
- Create hyper-personalized content at scale
- Improve cross-channel marketing while delivering a consistent message
4. Gather Intelligence on Campaign Performance
Data allows you to set and track actionable metrics and KPIs to measure the performance of your campaigns. Whether it’s social media, emails, A/B testing, or PPC, these insights will help you understand what works.
This allows you to identify patterns in data, so you don’t repeat the same mistakes and pinpoint the strategy that drives excellent results.
Get Started with Data-Driven Marketing in B2B
As a B2B marketer, all your decisions should be based on data. But creating an effective data-driven marketing strategy can be complicated. While the process differs from business to business, here are some steps that you must follow-
1. List Down Your Objectives
Before you start collecting data, you must determine why you want to do it. This is a crucial step to building a clear action plan. Why? Because not all data will have equal value.
For example, if your goal is to generate more leads, your approach will be different from a brand that wants to maximize customer retention. Setting clear goals will help you determine the type of information you need to collect, how to collect it, and what insights you need.
2. Gather and Organize Required Data
With your objectives neatly laid out, you’ll have a better understanding of the information you need. The next step is to identify potential sources and start collecting data.
You can do this through surveys, professional platforms like LinkedIn, sharing valuable gated content, buying databases from a reliable data provider, etc.
After gathering the required data, you must select a platform to organize it in such a way that it tells a story. For example, you can use BI or CRM software to store and organize data centrally.
3. Get Buy-in
You must get the leadership’s approval to implement a data-driven marketing strategy. Remember, it’s a long-term commitment. So, everyone, including C-level executives and non-marketing departments, must be on board. Why?
Because you’ll acquire data from all these departments, be it accounts, customer service, sales, or IT, every department must be thorough with the new strategy.
4. Identify the Right Platform
When it comes to data-driven marketing, there are several platforms you can choose from. Make sure you choose a platform that aligns with your goals and
- Streamlines sales and marketing
- Generates extensive reports and insights
- Provides data-based recommendations for channel and activities preferences of buyers
- Helps you execute your ABE strategies
- Meets data compliances
5. Run Campaigns and Track Progress
Finally, you can start running personalized campaigns for each target segment and keep track of their performance. In the previous step, if you chose a platform that provides comprehensive data management, you can use it to measure your KPIs and ROI too.
This way, you can identify strategies that work the best and keep making improvements without any hassle.
Elevate Your Efforts with Data-Driven Marketing
The concept of data-driven marketing in B2B is not new. It helps you create personalized and effective campaigns that boost conversions. But many marketers are still not reaping the benefits of this incredible approach. They still do not possess a system that can collect all their data and provide intelligent insights and recommendations. So start building your data-driven strategy and smartly choose a platform for data-driven marketing today to stay ahead of the curve and drive better outcomes for your brand.
