Access to customer data has evolved marketing communications. But does the traditional route to data-driven marketing warrant long-term profitability?

When it comes to discussing data-driven marketing, tech prowess and data have always been offered precedence. And honestly, that’s what most marketers themselves lean towards- they believe that collecting more data or devising complex models will help.

But this perspective poses a fundamental risk: overlooking the business decisions to be made and those who make them.

The reality is that your marketing strategies rarely fail due to technical glitches. The real issues are most often people-centric. And that’s why data shouldn’t be the ultimate goal but a supportive tool.

Edged at the very nexus of your marketing functions.

A modern framework: Data at the core of decisions

A study was conducted in 2022 on optimizing content marketing efforts with the assistance of natural language generation. The experiment was deemed successful.

In the traditional content marketing playbook, analyzing top-ranking content is all about numbers. But it’s humans who must curate pieces that fare better than these and also ensure they align with industry standards and SEO requirements.

The experiment automated the content creation bit. An LLM was able to generate pieces identical to high-ranking content that included industry-specific jargon. And after a year, it outperformed humans in this task- cutting down production and overhead costs, and improving efficiency.

But there’s a latent disjuncture here.

There’s no problem in leveraging tech innovations, but in the way they are deployed and executed. But for B2B marketers’ inability to implement this theoretical hearsay is what’s truly creating the gap. This process entails no clear vision or purpose.

Most businesses integrate advanced tech systems into their operations to make sense of the data they’ve accumulated. They hope that there’s some valuable insight embedded somewhere that can help refine the overall business performance.

Are you actually trying to drive business outcomes or merely attempting to justify the resources spent on collecting and storing the data?

Data should work as a two-edged sword.

It must help you communicate your brand value to the customers and also learn from customer interactions.

But what’s primarily fundamental is gauging the max out of customer heterogeneity- an aspect only data can afford modern B2B marketers. Think of the data from multiple touchpoints, platforms, and devices.

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They aren’t mere numbers- they tell you a story about your potential customers and the target market. Whether it’s about market trends or newly inculcated customer patterns, data analytics is the source of all basic knowledge.

They form a baseline understanding of your target market to help with solution designing and minor or major improvements along the course of the customer relationship.

However, there’s something causing a crucial disjuncture. Marketing is overreliant on data. The heaps of social data, chatroom conversations, clicks, customer emails, and call logs need simplification. Especially to be applied correctly to the strategies.

But this hindsight and overdependence on data itself don’t highlight what really matters: the alternative decisions at hand and the crucial questions.

Marketers believe that data-driven strategies can help customers make their decisions for them. This has oversimplified the business problem. The correct data-driven marketing tactics don’t decide for your prospects.

Instead, it should underscore the different solution alternatives and rank them from the one that fits their requirements to the one that does not. There’s not only one factor to consider, i.e., whether the solution will be able to provide the desired outcome. There are additional considerable factors, such as infrastructural changes, financial constraints, urgency of need, and talent hiring.

Your strategy must help outline every course of action that the buying committee can take. And help determine the datasets required to make an informed decision.

Your data-driven marketing strategies should be an antidote for your customers.

A data-driven marketing strategy: Knowing your buyers and what they value.

While data can offer precision, it can instill a faulty sense of certainty. This is what marketing managers should be aware of. Most of the data collected mirrors ongoing trends. It doesn’t contribute towards strategic planning of marketing roadmaps or new solutions.

And most marketing managers end up hopping on this bandwagon, whether it’s the latest tech, metric, or medium. Most often, they don’t pause to think whether these align with their context. Is it even relevant for our industry, target account, or customer segment?

Do you know your buyers, or the whole lot of them in buying committees?

The 6 to 10 decision-makers make up the core of a B2B buying committee. And while decisions are being made at different levels within an organization, the scope is generally constrained by the positions.

Marketing must assess the scope of the decision-making process and how those decisions are made, through the correct data.

This is where data can truly empower your marketing strategies.

1. Advanced customer segmentation: narrow down your total addressable market.

Businesses now have access to a treasure trove of big data from social media platforms, IoT, multiple devices, web interactions, and browsing, among other things. While this includes both structured and unstructured data, analytics helps clear this.

By applying advanced analytics to the clean data chunks, your business can underscore customer patterns, behaviors, predictions, and relevant conclusions. You take a step closer to gauging what your potential buyers want.

This analysis helps understand different customers based on their preferences, behavior, intent signals, and demographics. This data is then leveraged to churn out actionable insights that help segment target accounts that are in-market and interested, as opposed to those who aren’t.

The relevant target accounts become more accessible. And your marketing team now understands how to tailor the messages. There are minor shifts across the market or alterations in your account behavior that would be complex to spotlight.

It’s where data helps amplify your brand’s reach.

Your decision-making expedites. Bottlenecks and latency vanish as you adopt both an aerial and a ground-level view into your market.

With this, you can respond swiftly to gain a competitive edge across specific market segments. Your team isn’t just up-to-date with the market, but also boosts immediate decision-making at an impressive speed.

2. From standardization to personalization at scale.

In its initial phase, tech advancements introduced mass manufacturing of commodities. Standardization was feasible. And mass marketing became the norm.

But as IT advances further, it has become increasingly easy to uncover and tap into heterogeneous data to curate more personalized offers.

As service quality improves with deepening customer relationships, personalization is gradually becoming a necessity. It’s working in a never-ending loop. With more customer data accessible, it’s easier for advanced technology to underscore diverse customer segments and then micro-segments for your brand. As the tactics get more focused and targeted, there’s an inherent improvement in service quality and customer satisfaction.

This is the new phase of marketing- an iterative and multi-faceted comms approach, which is simply adaptive personalization:

• Integrate your CRM with marketing automation tools and software that enriches your data quality. This is merely the groundwork and an efficient way to optimize the traditional approaches without discarding them.
• Centralize data through CDPs to gauge intent signals and account prioritization. This improves targeting and offers a closer look at your buying accounts. You must outline each stakeholder in a single buying committee and engage them individually.

• Adapt data into your decision-making and outline future customer trends and needs. This will facilitate your team to build adaptive programs with tailored messaging that doesn’t grow stale in a short period. It also entails long-term impact and effectiveness.

Customer dynamism and heterogeneity demand more personal attention, i.e., a one-to-one approach.

In a product marketing scenario, most companies incorporate the feedback right into their products. But service-based solutions demand a dynamic approach that adapts to changing market and customer needs over time.

This means moving beyond minor tweaking of your marketing messages. Modern B2B buyers demand a hybrid and comprehensive approach that focuses on three significant pillars- content, messaging, and delivery- all tied into a tidy framework with advanced tech and supported by actionable insights.

With adaptive personalization, you avoid a fundamental mistake most B2B marketers make: prioritizing customer acquisition. The entire customer lifecycle is under the spotlight.

3. Curate strategic frameworks with predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics fundamentally helps:

1. analyze relationships
2. outline patterns
3. identify trends
4. And anticipate customer behavior

All of these tasks are carried out by analyzing customer datasets, from historical browsing data to past purchasing behaviors.

This methodology proves effective across different channels and touchpoints.

Whether a customer is engaging with your brand through their phone or desktop, you can gauge relevant data by monitoring different metrics, such as page view time, engagement rate, or whether they make a purchase.

This software is a treasure trove for businesses to shift to a much-needed dynamic ecosystem. It helps spotlight opportunities and identify risks from the get-go.

Marketers can leverage the forecasted insights to:

• Better customer experiences by modifying journeys beforehand.
• Forecast potential market shifts to help brands adapt.
• Support the scoring model by highlighting accounts with promising conversion potential.
• Prioritize relevant leads with high conversion potential.

These data points will then help your team gain insight into what would and wouldn’t work beforehand. This introduces a more proactive approach to engaging with clients across their lifecycle.

For example, churn prediction can help sales and marketing teams across SaaS businesses gauge which accounts are dissatisfied and likely to drop off. After which, the teams can codevelop retention strategies for accounts that are most likely to stay.

In short, predictive analytics operate as the fundamental blocks for assessing historical trends and developing forecasts.

How it all ties together: mapping the customer journey.

Customer journey maps are the visual representation of all the touchpoints customers interact with. It helps marketers draw the steps prospects take while interacting with a brand, from awareness to post-purchase.

Data helps tie every aspect together. To give a broader picture of how prospects are communicating with the brand.

You can think of the customer journey as a “data value chain” that highlights their key interactive moments with the brand. It helps determine the overall customer experience and future relationship.

With these insights, the objective is simple: curate effective marketing campaigns. The only underlying requirement is moving away from static and retrospective datasets.

Your customer needs are evolving every few months. And only real-time data can actually boost the responsiveness and relevance of your customer journey maps. What is truly of significance here is relevant insights gauged from accurate, to-the-bone customer data.

With this, marketers understand the type and intensity of experiences each account has across multiple touchpoints and channels. And they also identify the cracks in your fragmented multichannel strategies.

This makes up the basis of how (and where) to tweak CX, i.e., at which point, ultimately making or breaking the sales deal.

And under this umbrella of mapping the customer journey lies every other strategy, whether it’s personalization or predictive analytics.

Here, you’re understanding the customers and their funnel movements. And then you’re executing data-driven marketing strategies to vamp the CX. It all comes together in a neat loop.

Data-driven marketing strategies: The future of B2B marketing

Data-driven marketing strategies have moved beyond personalizing messages, discounts, or predicting buyers’ next moves. It boils down to understanding the B2B buying committee at its very nexus. And that starts with gauging what you don’t know about your prospective buyers.

Zeroing in on a single metric or channel, i.e., riding trends, can offer a skewed perspective on customers, their loyalty, and satisfaction levels. This can be distracting from the actual goal: identifying, engaging, and retaining customers.

Your marketing campaigns perform well under the realization that every customer’s needs, experience, and expectations are different. The same applies to decision-makers in a single buying committee.

No generic framework you build will result in the desired outcome.

So, the qualification questions or communication strategies you devise must implement relevant data strategically.

Data-driven marketing strategies aren’t about sticking numbers wherever they feel important. Instead, it’s about helping your team align the executed framework with relevant organizational goals.

Every marketing strategy is pertinent and might be developed based on the customer data gathered. But do they align with the outcome you’re considering or the customer’s decision-making process?

Instead, your B2B marketing campaigns must grow and improve with customers’ real-time behavior, from journey-based personalization to dynamically changing websites.

Asking the right questions falls on marketers.

Leveraging data isn’t all about orchestrating a smooth buying journey. The focus also falls on how marketing leverages it.

Data clusters available to marketing teams and managers can skew the overall perception. And the channels and platforms used across the campaigns contribute to it.

For example, to accurately gauge the effect of personalization from over 1,000 ad campaigns, it might prove highly detrimental to take the number of impressions at face value. It actually falls on marketers to make the correct judgment- which prospects did the ads truly impact?

Similarly, when SaaS businesses need to address churn, the focus is on which customers are the most likely to churn. But the actual spotlight should be on identifying those who will be receptive to marketing measures aimed at retaining them.

It’s marketing’s job to grasp that distinction, an area where algorithms are deemed ineffectual.

Using data correctly also involves asking critical questions right back.

The essence?

Data-driven marketing strategies shouldn’t be rooted in processing and applying data that makes little sense. Instead, B2B marketers must be able to gauge actionable insights from relevant data points.

And that ultimately helps you curate strategies that allow your customers to make informed and value-centric decisions.