Data-driven marketing in B2B has become more essential than ever in an industry that relies on measurements, personalization, and specific customer personas. So what is it exactly, and what are the benefits of implementing a data-driven strategy across your business? We reveal everything you need to know.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is a strategy that uses data insights to inform and optimize marketing decisions. This data can include customer interactions, behaviors and preferences all of which can be used to shape marketing decisions, enhance customer experiences, build campaigns and cultivate business strategies.
Our Propolis Expert, Tony Lamb,who runs our Data-Driven Marketing Essentials Training said: “This differs from traditional marketing because traditional marketing is based on gut instinct a lot of the time instead of information. [Marketers] might have an idea of their ideal customer without going into the data to understand what that looks like. So traditional marketing is more around what you naturally think over fact-based data.”
A community intelligence platform, Propolis helps B2B marketers confidently build the right strategies and skills to drive growth and prove their impact.
What are the benefits of data-driven marketing?
Data can be a true goldmine when used effectively. Rather than using it as a tool to leverage, you should view data-driven marketing as a strategy. So why is it important? In short, data drives ROI. If you’re sending marketing materials that are applicable to your audience, then you should be selling more and it should ideally be costing you less to sell more.
Tony explained: “If you think about it like selling a house. You wouldn’t just go down the street and say ‘Oh, I like that. I’ll buy that.’ You’d want to do some analysis and research what other properties are worth. You wouldn’t just go on gut instinct. It’s the same with marketing.”
As suggested in B2B Marketing’s report with Dun & Bradstreet earlier this year, How to gain buy-in and budget: Turning data into ROI, marketers find it challenging to demonstrate the value of data investments. It’s not always the case of course, but common pitfalls include not utilizing data to its full extent, not effectively proving its value to the board, and not connecting data to your strategic goals.
Fortunately, the report offers templates, which outlines specific metrics marketers can collect to create a compelling business case to the board.
In addition, we highly recommend checking out the next section which presents four unique stages to your data-driven strategy.
What is a data-driven marketing strategy?
Now that you’ve learned what data-driven marketing is and the benefits of it, let’s talk about how to execute a sound strategy in the B2B space. A data-driven marketing strategy is a method of using B2B marketing data to improve marketing efforts and guide decision-making. It involves collecting and analyzing data to recognize customer preferences, behaviors, and trends. These insights can be used to help execute marketing campaigns and other business goals.
According to Tony, you can follow these four stages to ensure your data-driven marketing strategy will lead to ROI.
Understanding the needs of the business: This part is the most crucial to perfecting your data-driven marketing. This is when you’ll be talking to stakeholders, conducting analysis in the market, and acknowledging the key questions the business ultimately needs to answer: What are you trying to achieve? Growing revenue? Acquiring customers? Whatever it might be, you can ask yourself how data can inform these goals.
Create your hypothesis: The next step is to formulate a hypothesis. This allows you to focus your efforts on a specific and actionable test rather than an idea. For example, you’ll be able to say ‘If we do [insert action] we’ll be able to achieve an ROI of [insert percentage] in six months’.
Look at the real world today: Based on your hypothesis, you can then establish what resources you have, what resources you need, and what research might already be out there. You can collect additional insights through third-party market research to ensure your plan is doable. After all, real-world data ensures your hypothesis is tested under practical conditions while making your results relevant to business scenarios.
Execution: Finally, this is where you’re making it happen through testing and learning. This can be anything from tracking a campaign’s performance to monitoring sales conversions over a long period of time. Ultimately, this is where you draw insights based on performance data and inevitably create new hypotheses, refine your business goals and tweak your strategy if needed.
Want to get more advice and expertise around these stages? Download this additional model created by Tony to guide you through your process.
What is an example of data marketing?
If you’re looking for data-driven marketing examples for inspiration, our 2023 B2B Marketing Awards featured some of the best, including SeeBlue’s campaign which nabbed the Gold for ‘Best use of customer insight.’
Allianz Partners, global leaders in health, life and disability insurance, were struggling to get customer renewals, failing new enterprise acquisitions and unable to share their full value to customers and strategic accounts.
Seeblue first conducted 75 Interviews with a range of stakeholders over a six month period to grasp what the core business strengths were. In addition, the agency also did bespoke research into regional growth opportunities, as well as deep account-specific research for 10 priority strategic accounts.
By applying a 360° insight model, Seeblue fundamentally changed thinking within Allianz Partners’ global sales and marketing teams. Allianz was able to win two new accounts while achieving an ROI of 598:1 and a blended 33% win rate.
And this year’s winner for the same award? Professional service firm KPMG was known for its traditional accounting and audit services, but the business wanted to be seen as a strategic advisor. In an effort to see what consumer-facing enterprises actually wanted in a partner, they conducted market research using qualitative and quantitative interviews. They found that 78% of respondents indicated a strong interest in thought leadership content and market insights. However, when asked directly about the ideal consulting partner, 84% prioritized a partner with a deep understanding of their specific business needs.
These findings suggested that while thought leadership had its place, building trust and demonstrating empathy was even more critical for success – particularly for a brand they would not typically consider. With True’s guidance, KPMG ran a campaign to relaunch its Consumer Advisory Services to highlight its memorable advertising and earned 9 million impressions proving just how valuable data insights can be.
What is an example of data-driven content marketing?
In addition to the Seeblue campaign, it’s important to see how data shines in other ‘non-data’ focused campaigns. For example, if you take a look at our most recent B2B Marketing Awards Winners Report, you can see that bespoke research is often used to establish objectives and strategies.
For instance, The Always-On Advantage by PA Consulting won the silver for ‘Best use of content’ for its incredible marketing impact. The transport industry was facing a time of uncertainty, shifting demand and profit erosion thanks to the permacrisis. And PA Consulting was not a well-known face that industry leaders can turn to. As a result, both quantitative and qualitative research went underway through 360 transport leaders with 20 in-depth interviews.
Tony explained: “If you’re thinking about content, you want to send content through to someone that will resonate with it and ideally help them with a problem. Instead of talking about your product and why it’s fantastic, why would a customer be interested in your product? How are you trying to help them? That is when data should be informing you. You’ll have your hypothesis of what content will be used and then you’ll see how it performs. That is where your data insight comes in and you can see how to customize that.”
And PA Consulting did exactly that. The data collected was crucial to developing the campaign’s concept around resilience and centering the campaign on the main issues in the transport industry. It clearly struck a chord with audiences and allowed PA Consulting to distinguish themselves as experts in the sector. The campaign was a smash hit with an ROI of 2,283%, 240 SQLs, and over 3000 website visits.
Does your data-driven marketing strategy not seem up to par with some of these award-winning campaigns? Or head to our community intelligence platform, Propolis. A global community where B2Bers come together, Propolis gives you access to insights to make decisions, connect with experts and unlock actionable guides and content – all of this to enable your company to develop and thrive.
