Why is using customer data in B2B marketing important

A new four letter word seems to have taken over a lot of minds these days. It’s called DATA. When it comes to B2B marketing, it is something whose importance cannot be undermined. The four letter word has become absolutely essential to running a successful marketing campaign. If you’re missing out on mining your company’s data to help fortify your B2B marketing efforts then you’re missing out on innumerable resources that are readily available to you.

 

The use of data not only aids in better defining your target audience but also helps you to attract higher quality leads as also assists in personalizing your marketing, allowing you to build long-lasting and stronger relationships with the businesses you’re targeting.
The following are a few examples of how the use of data can benefit your B2B marketing strategy.

Augmenting data from various sources
When you collect first hand data from the interaction that you’ve had with targeted businesses, it is known as First party data. It could anything from their purchase history or their history of downloads from your site like eBooks or white papers. This kind of data is extremely helpful in targeting leads using email marketing.
But there is one other point that you need to keep in mind and that is augmenting the use of first party data with that of third party data. Now third party data is data that is collected from outside providers, which means it’s data that you haven’t collected from your users.
Third party data comes handy if you wish to better understand your customers’ wants and needs. This in turn allows you to create more accurate buyer personas. So when you actually get down to creating buyer personas, please remember to consider customer demographics, psychographic characteristics, values, pain-points, motivations, goals, favorite brands, and preferred channels of communication.

Segmenting and personalizing
By poring over both first party and third party data, you’ll not only be defining your target group but also be able to segment them so that you’re not just marketing towards one of your potential target audiences. Remember, it is a possibility to have more than one target audience.
To elucidate our point, let’s look at startups and medium-sized enterprises. They both fall into the business category but at the same time they have very different pain-points and will require different messaging. Generally speaking, startups would be more interested in some issues such as affordability, whereas medium-sized enterprises would be more interested in reliability.
You can divide your marketing using the data you have collected so that you can personalize your marketing energies more, such as by directly targeting startup companies with a particular email while directly targeting mid-sized companies with another. You can meet their specific needs using this method.

Targeted marketing
It will come as no surprise to you when you start applying the data you have collected from customers, you will notice that your target base shrinks to quite a small number. This does not necessarily mean lesser sales.
This is turn is a good practice because when you focus on a targeted audience, you generally have a much higher success rate. Whereas with a broader target, you’re probably wasting your resources on businesses that won’t be interested in your products or services.
If you look at it closely, you will realize that targeted marketing only helps you go a long way and establish new relations. It’s not just that the use of data can help, it’s that not using data can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts. By ignoring your consumer data, your message will end up falling on deaf ears, which means a big part of your marketing budget is going to waste.