“Data is our most valuable asset” is a phrase marketers, especially those in B2B, repeat over and over again. You will hear B2B data compared to gold, oil, and any other precious resource. There is little dispute about its importance.
We are also investing heavily in data. MAPs, CRMs, CDPs, and endless martech tools consume a large portion of our budget each year. Our reporting is now full of statistics from digital campaigns – a stark contrast to the old days, when B2B companies advertised in trade publications and hoped it would bring business benefits, despite limited evidence either way. But more data has made clear decisions.
Despite these reams of data flowing into the marketing department, we still haven’t turned it into insight. It is very easy to generate tables and graphs from our data. We fill presentations and reports with them, and even use automated tools to extract this data-rich eye candy without the marketer looking at the numbers.
But what does the data tell us? How many times have you seen a report that says a metric improved last month without explaining why? Or the one that shows endless analysis of poor metrics? If campaign X generated twice the CTR of campaign Y, that’s great. But without knowing how much each click cost or what happened after the click, it doesn’t really tell us which campaign was better.
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B2B sales make understanding difficult to measure
Measuring B2B campaigns is difficult. Sales cycles are long, buying committees are large, and it can be a challenge to find the potential value of a project from a data sheet count, or even if it’s just a competitor keeping tabs on you.
Most sales cycles are measured in months, although some are years, and I’ve worked with a client whose sales cycle could be two decades (good thing the project costs were huge). Knowing the importance of communication at different stages of the customer journey is almost impossible. Is it important to be top of mind early in the sales cycle, or should you focus your effort at the bottom of the funnel, where decisions are actually made?
High value prospects are difficult to identify and reach
The biggest challenge is that many B2B industries are characterized by a few high-value customers and many small customers that may only be marginally profitable. Account-based marketing (ABM) may be the solution you’re thinking of for this challenge. However, it is far from perfect.
Finding out which company your website visitor works for is harder than ever. The days of prospects filling out forms to get content are long gone. Even HubSpot recently announced that it has dropped Inbound as the topic of its annual conference. Asking visitors to sign up for a better experience sounds like a good idea. However, your customers and prospects probably haven’t done that since they created the My Yahoo page at the turn of the last century.
IP tracking is one way, but working remotely makes it more difficult than ever to associate multiple visitor IP addresses with a company. Many marketers find that a large percentage of visitors reject cookies, too, removing another way to present personalization.
Even if you have information about the visitor, how well are you using it? Most ABM campaigns offer custom content, but only on campaign-specific landing pages. Very few B2B companies personalize their main website.
The measurement is shortened, and the measurement is delayed
Estimating is difficult, but often not very helpful. What you need to do is measure the increase: how much your sales have increased. B2C marketers will tell you to run tests to see if audiences behave differently when exposed to your marketing campaigns or not. With sales cycles over years, and often a small number of large customers acquired each year, this is not possible. B2B marketers often embrace attribution, even if they know this metric can be limiting and misleading.
Even if balancing is possible, internal policies can make it difficult. Usually, company policies are set by reasonable people, but without understanding the reasons behind that, they may seem contradictory. GDPR and other privacy laws present great opportunities for companies to shoot themselves in the foot.
Careful managers will decide to discard marketing data, by deleting old contacts or applying unnecessarily strict logging policies. Sales teams often lose important data because of these methods, although some parts of the company (I’m looking at the sales team in particular) continue to process personal data without real control.
Many B2B teams are not using data effectively
I presented several problems with data usage. If you work in a large enterprise, you will probably know the challenges and have a marketing data team working on improving your data usage. This is not the case for SMEs, who make up a large portion of the B2B industry, but often lack the resources or technical expertise to effectively implement complex martech, build effective ABM campaigns, or truly understand the business impact of their work.
That’s bad, but the fact that, as marketers, we don’t do what we say is even worse. I’ve said before that form registrations are really hard to find, but it’s probably the most important data in B2B: someone wants you to market to them. But when my agency did a test in the engineering field and signed up to receive newsletters and updates by email, almost half of the companies didn’t send anything.
Fix the basics first
Maybe this is the real problem. We’re all so busy managing customer data warehouses and preparing automated reports that we forget the basics. It is time to take a serious look at what we are missing. If you go by our research, almost half of the people reading this fail to do simple things. Yes, you are not in that part. Or you?
