“Data is our most valuable asset” is a phrase that marketers, especially B2B marketers, repeat so often. You’ll hear B2B data compared to gold, oil, and almost every other valuable resource. Its importance arouses little controversy.
We also invest heavily in data. Our MAPs, CRMs, CDPs and countless martech tools consume a significant portion of our budget each year. Our reporting is now full of digital campaign analytics – which is very different from the good old days, when B2B companies advertised in trade publications and believed it would bring commercial benefits, despite limited evidence one way or the other. But more data hasn’t made decisions clearer.
Despite these data lakes circulating in the marketing department, we still cannot transform them into information. It is too easy to produce tables and graphs from our data. We fill presentations and reports with them, and even use automated tools to produce this data-rich eye candy without a marketer having to look at the numbers.
But what does the data tell us? How often have you seen a report that a metric improved last month without explaining why? Or the one who offers endless analysis of bad indicators? If campaign X generated twice the CTR of campaign Y, that’s positive. But without knowing how much each click costs or what happened after the click, it doesn’t really tell us which campaign was better.
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B2B sales make information difficult to measure
Measuring B2B campaigns is difficult. Sales cycles are long, buying committees are numerous, and it can be difficult to determine the likely value of the project that will result from downloading a spec sheet, or even if it’s just a competitor watching you.
Most sales cycles are measured in months, although some are in years, and I even worked with a client whose sales cycle could last up to two decades (luckily the project costs were enormous). Knowing the importance of interactions at different stages of the customer journey is almost impossible. Is it essential to be in the lead early in the sales cycle, or should you focus your efforts at the bottom of the funnel, where decisions are actually made?
High-value prospects are difficult to identify and reach
The hard part is that many B2B industries are characterized by a few high-value customers and many small customers who may only be marginally profitable. Account-based marketing (ABM) is probably the solution you’re thinking of to address this challenge. However, it’s far from perfect.
Determining which company your website visitor works for is more difficult than ever. The days when prospects happily filled out forms to get content are long gone. Even HubSpot just announced that it has dropped Inbound as the title of its annual conference. Asking visitors to register for a better experience seems like a good idea. Yet your customers and prospects probably haven’t done this since they created a My Yahoo page near the end of the last century.
IP tracking is an option, but remote working makes it harder than ever to associate many visitors’ IP addresses to a business. Most marketers find that a high percentage of visitors also opt out of cookies, eliminating another way to introduce personalization.
Even if you know information about the visitor, how much do you use it? Most ABM campaigns offer personalized content, but only on campaign-specific landing pages. Very few B2B companies customize their main website.
Attribution is insufficient and measurement is limited
Attribution is difficult, but it’s often not very useful. What you need to do is measure incrementality: how much you have increased your sales. B2C marketers will tell you to run tests to see if an audience behaves differently when exposed to your marketing campaigns versus not seeing them. With sales cycles that span several years and often a small number of large customers acquired each year, this is simply not possible. B2B marketers often settle for attribution, even though they know this metric can be limited and misleading.
Even when measurement is possible, internal politics can make it more difficult. Typically, company policies are set by sensible people, but without understanding the reasons, they can seem counterproductive. GDPR and other privacy laws provide great opportunities for brands to shoot themselves in the foot.
Prudent executives will decide to throw away marketing data, either by eliminating old contacts or implementing unnecessarily strict membership policies. Marketing teams often lose valuable data through these approaches, even if other parts of the business (I’m looking at the sales team in particular) continue to process personal data without any real control.
Many B2B teams are not using data effectively
I presented several issues related to data usage. If you work in a large company, you will certainly be aware of the challenges and have a marketing data team working to improve your use of data. This is not the case for SMBs, which make up a large portion of the B2B sector, but often don’t have the resources or technical expertise to effectively use complex martech, create effective ABM campaigns, or truly understand the business impact of their work.
That’s bad, but the fact that as marketers we don’t always do what we say is even worse. I’ve mentioned before that form signups are very difficult to get, but they’re probably the most valuable data in B2B: someone who actually wants you to market to them. But when my agency did a test in the engineering industry and signed up to receive newsletters and email updates, about half of the companies didn’t send anything.
Fix the Basics First
Maybe that’s the real problem. We’re all so busy managing customer data warehouses and setting up automatically generated reports that we forget the basics. It’s time to honestly examine whether we are missing the obvious. If you follow our research, about half of the people reading this fail to do the simple things. Of course, you’re not in that half. Or are you?
