Marketers working for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are often tasked with collecting, managing and strategically utilizing data with smaller budgets and more limited resources compared to enterprise marketers—yet expectations remain high.

OMI recently collaborated with Ascend2 to survey 346 marketers working for SMBs (companies with 500 or fewer employees) to better understand the quality of SMB marketing data. The results shed light on how SMB marketers can focus their efforts to improve marketing data quality and are even more eye opening when compared to the results from our survey late last year on email marketing for enterprise marketers. Here are some of my top takeaways from the report:

Data quality is a bigger challenge for SMBs than enterprise companies.

Only 17% of SMBs say that the quality of the data that they currently collect, manage, and utilize is of best-in-class caliber, a stark contrast to 47% of enterprise companies. On the other side of the spectrum, nearly the same amount of SMBs (15%) admit their data quality is insufficient. 

Data is available, but not well utilized.

Only 20% of small business marketers feel extremely confident in their ability to leverage the

data they collect. This is less than half of the highly confident enterprise marketers (41%) who utilize data to improve business for their organization.

Email marketing data delivers results for SMBs.

Nearly half (47%) of SMB marketers report that email marketing data is the highest quality data at their organization, followed closely by social media data (42%) and purchase history data (40%).

Better data means better outcomes.

SMB marketers agree that higher quality marketing data improves customer experience 62%), engagement (47%) and lead generation (38%).

With more than 30 million small businesses in the U.S., SMBs represent a valuable target for growing your business. High-quality marketing data is a must for reaching SMBs at scale, but maintaining accurate data can be a challenge especially for SMB contacts, as they often change personnel and email addresses more frequently than larger companies.

At OMI, we know the ins and outs of SMB data very well. SMB marketing data has been a big part of our business through the years, and we’ve built one of the largest U.S.-focused SMB databases in the world, with 70+ million SMB email contacts. The quality of our data is well known and we guarantee it at 95% email validity for 30 days.

The full survey, “The Outlook on Marketing Data Quality: New Research from the Small and Mid-Size Business Perspective,” is now available for download. Feel free to use our findings and please reach out if you have any questions for me or my team.

OMI’s high-quality B2B business contact data is used by Fortune 1000 firms and start-ups alike to drive modern digital marketing initiatives—from intent monitoring and ABM to email marketing and omnichannel campaigns utilizing display, social media, and more. Reach out to our team today for more information.