B2B Growth Hack: Outpace Your Competitors with These 5 Essential Data Strategies

B2B marketers around the world agree: data is unanimously viewed as the most important catalyst for driving an effective sales and marketing strategy and improving business performance overall. In fact,  most marketers today will tell you that quality data is necessary for conducting essential business growth initiatives – from sales prospecting, to lead qualification, personalization, customer journey mapping and much more.

 

If your business is looking to outpace the competition this year, look no further than your data. Here are five B2B growth hacks driven by quality data:

 

 

• Find ways to improve your data confidence: While B2B marketers acknowledge the importance of superior data, they admit that the quality of their own data is suspect at best. A recent report says that half of B2B firms are not confident in the quality of their data, resulting in reduced impact on business success. For any business falling short where data confidence is concerned, my recommendation is to turn to outside resources for support and expertise. In addition, many companies today are hiring chief data officers to overcome their struggles.

 

• Getting segmentation right is a priority: B2B marketers know the importance of segmenting their prospects to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. But a large percentage of marketers still lack confidence in their ability to create a campaign list that accurately reflects their target audiences. With so many ways to segment audiences to engage with them effectively – including by geography, industry, online activity or company size – getting segmentation right has become vital for all marketers today. It’s important to invest the time and effort in it, or you’ll risk alienating your prospects and customers.

 

• Don’t let your data decay: As your contacts are forever changing roles, companies, and contact information, their data is in a constant state of flux. In fact, our data at OMI shows that contact data decays at a rate of 2-3% a month. In addition, corporate addresses, CEOs and corporate telephone numbers also change frequently. The upshot is, whether you use an outside resource to cleanse your data, or you have an internal strategy in mind, make sure you invest in keeping your business contact data current. It’s the only way to ensure that your marketing messages are reaching the intended audiences.

 

• Overcome system integration hurdles: Compounding today’s data challenge is that in addition to maintaining existing data, B2B companies are constantly collecting more data, which has to be captured, integrated and added to existing systems that don’t always work well together. Unfortunately, many businesses lack the capability to effectively integrate incremental data with their CRM platforms and other systems. But that needs to change, because when it comes to data strategy, it’s important to get your entire team working together in order to maximize the value that your data can generate. Today’s organizations should focus on the big data picture – and the only way to do that is to eliminate data siloes.

 

• Align sales and marketing: The gulf between sales and marketing remains a constant source of pain. That’s because it’s very difficult to align sales and marketing data when executing programs across multiple channels. The solution lies in improving communication and transparency: sales needs to understand what marketing is doing to acquire and nurture leads, while marketers need to incorporate the substantial customer insights that can come from sales interactions.

 

The bottom line is that if your company is challenged with acquiring, managing or internally sharing customer data, you’re certainly not alone. The important thing is to take action and make the changes that will enable you to reach your business goals. As always, let us know if we can support you in your data strategies.

 

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate email data can enable you to achieve better email marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Take a look at our case studies to find out more.