Updated: Dec 2, 2024
Data plays an integral role in modern business practices, from operations to strategy, and marketing is no exception. A data-driven marketing strategy ensures every marketing step is steeped in insights, empowering organizations to identify their ideal customers, zero in on the best channels to reach them, address customers’ unique preferences and needs at different stages of their buying journey and adjust performance on the fly and long-term. Data provides a foundation for overall strategy, supports marketing investment decisions and proves the effectiveness of campaigns.
What are the challenges with data-driven marketing?
Aligning sales and marketing teams
Effective use of marketing data requires close collaboration between sales and marketing teams, which can be a difficult goal to achieve, particularly if data isn’t readily accessible or understood by both. Differing priorities and goals and poor communication around data insights can also stand in the way of your data-driven marketing goals.
Data quality
An effective data-driven strategy requires high-quality, accurate data. Unfortunately, the volume of data available to marketers today can make it difficult to wrangle it for business use. With so many sources of marketing data, some of them fragmented, data is often incomplete, inaccurate or in disparate formats and structures, making it difficult to consolidate complete and correct datasets. Additionally, the shifting nature of B2B means that data can quickly become outdated. For instance:
- Firmographic data – Contact names, job titles, company size and revenue insights are constantly changing due to job moves, company mergers and shifts in business structures, making it difficult to maintain accurate firmographic data for targeted campaigns.
- Technographic data – Likewise, technological advances can hinder your efforts to stay on top of the specific technologies and tech budgets of your target customers.
- Intent data – The B2B buying journey is notoriously long and complex, involving multiple decision-makers, which can make it challenging to track and target the right individuals through the buying process.
Skillset
Leveraging data to drive your marketing strategies and decisions requires technical expertise to implement and manage advanced marketing tools and specialized skills to analyze and interpret large datasets. Without the right skillset, marketers can easily become overwhelmed by the amount of data, making it difficult to make good decisions. Putting together a team of data-driven marketing experts requires the necessary proficiencies, including the ability to:
- Identify relevant data metrics for measuring campaign performance
- Analyze historical data and current data and use machine learning and statistical models to predict outcomes and recommend actions
- Confidently adapt marketing strategies in real-time
- Accurately assign credit to different marketing channels and touchpoints within a complex B2B sales cycle
Tip #1 – Get to the heart of your audience with qualitative insights
With so much data available to you, it’s easy to forget about qualitative data. Collected from surveys, interviews, focus groups and customer feedback, qualitative data helps you understand your customers’ motivations and experiences and how they perceive your brand. It gives you a deep insight into the emotional drivers and values that influence your audience’s decisions, enabling you to position your brand message in a way that resonates with your audience and drives the desired action.
Tip #2 – Scale your efforts with a blended approach
When you combine first-, second- and third-party data, you can expand your data-driven marketing efforts with greater precision. Lookalike or similar audiences, on LinkedIn or Google Ads for example, are created by identifying individuals with similar characteristics to your brand’s existing customers. Third-party data purchased from an entity like ZoomInfo or Dun & Bradstreet can help you identify and target potential customers by leveraging demographic and firmographic data for more personalized sales outreach at scale. A blended approach increases the accuracy of campaign targeting and boosts your lead generation efforts.
Tip #3 – Test and experiment for continuous improvement
A/B testing plays a crucial role in data-driven marketing, allowing you to make evidence-based decisions rather than relying on subjective choices or assumptions. By experimenting with different elements, you can identify what resonates most with your audience, drives the desired actions and delivers the best results. Iterative A/B testing allows you to continuously refine ad campaigns, emails, landing pages and web pages, optimizing for maximum conversions over time.
Tip #4 – Use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs
Predictive analytics enable you to preemptively deliver exactly what your customers need before they know they need it. It involves analyzing historical data using advanced statistical techniques and machine learning algorithms to forecast behaviors, trends and outcomes. This approach informs your marketing decisions based on past patterns and projected customer actions. In data-driven marketing, predictive analytics enables you to create proactive strategies that align with your audience’s shifting behaviors and emerging preferences.
Tip #5 – Team up with an experienced B2B marketing agency
B2B marketing agencies have been using data to drive their decision-making since customer relationship management (CRM) systems were introduced in the 1980s. Early CRM systems allowed businesses to track customer interactions and sales pipelines, laying the foundation for data-driven marketing strategies. Over the past 15 years, the explosion of data and advances in analytics has moved data to a leading role in marketing. Today, leveraging data to inform marketing decisions is table stakes across B2B and consumer marketing.
The expertise of a B2B agency gives you the advantage of a strategic and nuanced data-backed approach that includes:
Integrating your systems – One of the greatest challenges around a data-driven approach is ensuring data moves seamlessly between your technologies. When systems are fragmented or data formats vary between platforms, data can be incomplete, inaccurate or outdated, leading to erroneous targeting and wasted marketing spending. A B2B marketing agency can help you integrate your systems to ensure marketing decisions are based on accurate insights.
Improving sales and marketing communication – B2B agencies specialize in bridging the gap between sales and marketing by facilitating workshops that encourage communication and strategy alignment. Custom sales enablement materials, such as pitch decks and playbooks, ensure sales teams are equipped to effectively translate marketing campaigns into meaningful engagements and closed deals.
Advanced lead targeting and segmentation – B2B marketing agencies go beyond surface-level insights, blending qualitative data, market research and industry insights with firmographic, technographic, behavioral and intent data. This approach enables advanced segmentation and messaging tactics for high-impact, personalized marketing strategies.
Account-based marketing (ABM) – B2B agencies have been practicing ABM principles for decades –– even before the term was coined –– using data to identify specific contacts within high-value accounts and target them with highly personalized interactions to foster deep relationships and win more profitable sales.
Data-driven content strategies – Analyzing customer behaviors, market research and industry trends gives agencies deep insights into your target audience’s challenges, needs and aspirations, as well as their content and channel preferences. B2B agencies perform qualitative research to help you understand your competitive strengths, customers’ pain points and goals, and the factors that drive purchase decisions, loyalty and churn. This empowers you to tailor your messaging to different customer segments, ensuring you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time and place.
Testing, measuring and optimizing ROI – A significant benefit of working with a B2B agency lies in their ability to test, track and measure every campaign’s performance. Analyzing insights from A/B tests, CRM data, marketing automation platforms and third-party data enables agencies to continuously adjust strategies and campaigns based on the most effective tactics, ensuring you get the most bang for your marketing buck.
Enhance your data-driven marketing strategies
Effective data-driven marketing can be a challenge, from collecting high-quality data to understanding how to interpret and apply it to your decision-making. Without the right strategy, it’s easy to miss valuable insights or make misinformed choices. With over 25 years of expertise in B2B marketing and a data-driven focus, Elevation Marketing can help you navigate these challenges. Our tailored approach ensures your marketing efforts are fueled by actionable insights that enhance targeting, engagement and overall success. Contact us to see how we can help you turn your data into a powerful tool for driving growth and achieving your sales and marketing goals.
