At B2B Marketing, we believe the key to proving marketing’s impact is to become the commercial marketer. One of the essential skills to becoming the commercial marketer is market insight. Marketers must have the ability to understand how their market and target audience works while staying informed on industry trends. In this blog, Hannah Stringer, Marketing Director, Moneypenny shares some advice on championing this skill.
In B2B marketing, we’re never short of data. Dashboards, campaign metrics, conversion rates .. the numbers are endless. But data on its own isn’t enough. To make a real commercial impact, we need to turn information into insight and the kind that shapes decisions, inspires action, and connects marketing activity directly to business outcomes.
At Moneypenny, we’ve seen firsthand how insight skills separate traditional marketers from true commercial marketers. It’s not about chasing clicks for the sake of a report. It’s about asking the bigger questions: What does this really tell us about our customers? How does this align with our wider strategy? And how do we use it to drive measurable growth?
Raw data gives you what happened. Insight explains why it happened and that’s where the value lies. For example, knowing that email open rates are dropping is useful, but digging deeper to understand which segments are disengaging and why is what guides effective change.
One of the most common mistakes I see in B2B is treating analytics as the end of the process rather than the start. Reports shouldn’t be the full stop, they should be the question mark that sparks curiosity. Commercial marketers don’t just present statistics; they connect the dots and tell a story that resonates with the C-suite. Numbers matter, but the narrative matters more.
At Moneypenny, when we launch a new campaign to highlight our AI Voice Agent for example, we don’t just look at click-through rates. We ask: Which industries are engaging most strongly? Are IT decision-makers responding differently from operations directors? By layering behavioural insight on top of headline metrics, we’re able to refine our messaging so it lands with the right audience at the right moment.
The best insights come when we stop looking at metrics in isolation and instead step into the customer’s shoes. Whether it’s mapping out the buyer journey, running customer interviews, or listening closely to feedback from our frontline teams, it’s this blend of quantitative and qualitative insight that ensures our campaigns are relevant, timely, and customer-first.
At Moneypenny, this is especially important because empathy, tone, and trust are at the heart of every client interaction. Data can tell us when call volumes spike or which digital channels are growing fastest. But it’s the customer insight behind those numbers that helps us innovate, whether that’s creating AI tools to handle routine calls, or designing hybrid solutions that combine technology with live receptionists.
For example, insight showed us that many professional services firms wanted the cost savings of AI, but also needed the reassurance of a human backup. That led us to refine our messaging to focus on the marriage of people and technology, rather than positioning AI as a replacement. The result was stronger resonance with decision-makers and a measurable uplift in lead quality.
Insight also acts as a compass for where to invest. In an environment where budgets are scrutinised, B2B marketers must prioritise activity that delivers ROI. That means using insight to cut through the noise, back the strategies that work, and pivot quickly when something isn’t landing.
A practical way to approach this is to ask three questions:
- What do the numbers say?
- What does customer behaviour tell us?
- What does this mean for the business as a whole?
At Moneypenny, this approach has helped us direct budget towards sectors with the highest growth potential. For instance, insight revealed that mid-sized accountancy firms were increasingly open to outsourcing communications to free up fee-earner time. By acting on that intelligence, we invested more in content and campaigns tailored to accountancydecision-makers, while scaling back in lower-return sectors. This gave us higher-quality leads, shorter sales cycles, and clear ROI that we could take to the board.
Ultimately, insight skills aren’t just about marketing effectiveness; they’re about influence. When marketers use insight to frame discussions in the language of business outcomes, market share, revenue growth, customer lifetime value they earn credibility with leadership teams.
This is what shifts marketing from being perceived as a cost centre to a growth driver. A campaign result may get polite attention, but a story about how marketing delivered an extra £x m in pipeline or shortened the sales cycle by three weeks speaks directly to the priorities of a CFO or CEO.
That’s been our experience at Moneypenny. When we demonstrated how a combination of targeted ABM and industry insight directly influenced opportunities and fuelled commercial growth it has real impact with the board.
The challenge for B2B marketers is that data has become commoditised. Every business can report impressions, clicks and open rates. The real differentiator is insight: the ability to interpret data, understand customer needs, and shape strategy that moves the business forward.
It’s also about courage. Sometimes insight tells you that a long-cherished tactic isn’t working. Sometimes it points you towards a new audience or channel that feels untested. But the commercial marketer embraces that guidance, because they know decisions anchored in insight will deliver stronger long-term outcomes than gut instinct or vanity metrics.
Insight is one of the six essential skills of a commercial marketer and with good reason. It moves us from surface-level activity to meaningful, outcome-driven marketing.
At Moneypenny, insight has shaped everything from how we communicate the balance between AI and human expertise, to which industries we prioritise, to how we prove ROI back to the board. It’s not always the easiest path, but it’s the one that ensures marketing is directly tied to growth.
In a world overflowing with data, it’s the ability to uncover, interpret and act on insight that really moves the needle. Marketers who develop this skill not only improve campaign performance but also elevate their role within the business. They stop talking about activity and start talking about impact. And that’s the language every C-suite wants to hear.
