B2B marketers are drowning in data but starving for insight

“Data is our most valuable asset” is a phrase marketers, particularly those in B2B, repeat so often. You’ll hear B2B data compared to gold, oil, and almost any other precious resource. There’s little argument about its importance.

We also invest heavily in data. Our MAPs, CRMs, CDPs, and endless martech tools consume a significant portion of our budget each year. Our reporting is now full of analytics from digital campaigns — quite different from the good old days, when B2B companies advertised in trade publications and trusted it would bring business benefits, despite limited evidence either way. But more data hasn’t made decisions any clearer.

Despite these lakes of data flowing through the marketing department, we’re still not turning it into insight. It’s too easy to produce tables and graphs from our data. We fill presentations and reports with them, and even use automated tools to churn out 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 states a metric improved last month without explaining why? Or one that features endless analysis of poor metrics? 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 really doesn’t tell us which campaign was better.

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B2B sales make insight hard to measure

Measuring B2B campaigns is hard. Sales cycles are long, buying committees are large, and it can be challenging to work out the likely value of the project that will result from a download of a data sheet, or even if it’s just a competitor keeping tabs on you.

Most sales cycles are measured in months, though some are years, and I’ve even worked with a client whose sales cycle could be as long as two decades (good thing the project costs were huge). Knowing the importance of interactions at different stages of the customer journey is almost impossible. Is it essential to be top of mind at the start of the sales cycle, or should you focus your effort at the bottom of the funnel, where decisions are actually made?

High-value prospects are difficult to identify and reach

More challenging is that many B2B industries are characterized by a few high-value customers and many smaller customers who might only be marginally profitable. Account-based marketing (ABM) is likely to be the solution you’re thinking of to this challenge. However, it’s far from perfect.

Working out which company your website visitor works for is harder than ever. The days of prospects happily filling forms to get content are long gone. Even HubSpot has just announced it has abandoned Inbound as the title of its annual conference. Asking visitors to register for a better experience sounds like a good idea. Still, your customers and prospects probably haven’t done that since they created a My Yahoo page toward the end of the last century.

IP tracking is one option, but remote working makes it harder than ever to associate many visitor IP addresses with a company. Most marketers find that a large percentage of visitors decline cookies, too, eliminating another way to introduce personalization.

Even if you do know information about the visitor, how well do you use it? Most ABM campaigns offer custom content, but only on campaign-specific landing pages. Very few B2B companies are personalizing their core website.

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Attribution falls short, and measurement is constrained

Attribution is tough, but it’s often not very helpful. What you need to do is measure incrementality: how much you grew sales. B2C marketers will tell you to run tests to see whether an audience behaves differently when they’re exposed to your marketing campaigns or don’t see them. With sales cycles in years, and often a small number of large customers acquired each year, this is just impossible. B2B marketers often settle for attribution, even if they know this metric can be limited and misleading.

Even when measurement is possible, internal policies can make it harder. Generally, company policies are set by sensible people, but without understanding the reasons behind them, they might appear counterproductive. GDPR and other privacy legislation provide great opportunities for brands to shoot themselves in the foot. 

Cautious executives will decide to throw out marketing data, either by culling old contacts or implementing unnecessarily strict opt-in policies. Marketing teams often lose valuable data because of these approaches, even though other parts of the company (I’m looking at the sales team in particular) continue processing personal data without any real control.

Many B2B teams aren’t using data effectively

I’ve presented several problems with the use of data. If you work in a large enterprise, you’ll almost certainly be aware of the challenges and have a marketing data team working on improving your use of data. This isn’t the case for SMEs, which form a large proportion of the B2B industry, but often don’t have the resources or technical expertise to effectively use complex martech, build effective ABM campaigns, or really 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 worse. I’ve mentioned before that form signups are really hard to get, but they’re possibly the most valuable data in B2B: someone actually wanting you to market to them. But when my agency ran a test in the engineering sector and signed up to receive newsletters and updates by email, around half of the companies didn’t send anything.

Fix the basics first

Perhaps this is the real problem. We’re all so busy managing customer data warehouses and configuring automatically generated reports that we forget the basics. It’s time to take an honest look at whether we’re missing the obvious. If you go by our research, around half of the people reading this are failing to do the simple things. Of course, you aren’t in that half. Or are you?