More than an opportunity, deploying data-driven marketing strategies in B2B digital marketing is necessary for success in these digitally driven times.
If implemented correctly, these B2B digital marketing strategies help businesses to predict customer behaviour and optimise marketing activities. This leads to a significant increase in engagement and higher conversion rates.
In this blog, we briefly look into the ten best practices for integrating data into your marketing efforts, as done by successful B2B companies. We will also give you some insights about the approach used by Akscellence.
Understanding the Role of Data – Marketing
Data-driven marketing utilises both data science with regular marketing practices to make smarter decisions.
Adopting this method helps marketers understand what customers like and how they behave. This is because we are using real data, instead of just guessing.
This way, marketing is more effective as we know exactly what’s happening with our customers.
Next up in the blog let’s understand, which best practices we can adopt to supercharge our business with B2B digital marketing strategies.
Best Practice 1: Knowing Your Perfect Customer
The first thing to do in any good marketing plan is to figure out who your customers are. For businesses that sell to other businesses using Data-Driven Marketing, this means looking closely at customer data to understand who buys from them.
This helps businesses know not only who their customers are, but also what these customers need and how they act. This way, companies can make their marketing more suited to these needs.
For example, a B2B company that sells software to big businesses might use customer relationship management (CRM) systems and track how customers interact with them to find out which features are most popular and needed. They then use this info to improve their products and tailor their marketing to focus on these important features.
Best Practice 2: Making Sure Data is Good and Correct
For marketing that uses data to make decisions, the data must be of good quality. This means the data needs to be accurate, complete, and up-to-date. Companies should check their data regularly, clean it up, and make sure it’s correct to keep their marketing effective.
For example, an online store that sells to other businesses checks and updates all their customer data every six months.
By doing this, they avoid using old or wrong information in their marketing. This leads to more people engaging with their ads and campaigns, and it costs less money to run these campaigns.
Best Practice 3: Understanding the Customer’s Buying Process
In B2B digital marketing strategies, it’s very important to know the steps a buyer takes from first learning about your brand to finally buying something. You need to know every time a customer comes in contact with your brand, from the start to the end.
Using data helps marketers shape their approaches to connect better with customers at every step.
For example, a company that makes industrial machines watches how people visit their website, respond to emails, and interact on social media to see how clients move from just knowing about them to buying.
They use this information to improve their content and give useful information at each step of the customer’s journey.
Best Practice 4: Grouping Customers Carefully
Data-driven marketing means putting your customers into specific groups based on their actions, what they buy, and what they like. This helps you create marketing that is very focused and feels personal to each customer.
For example, a cloud service provider company sorts its customers by how big their business is, what kind of business they do, and how they’ve interacted with the company before.
This careful grouping allows them to send very tailored messages and offers, which has increased their sales from these efforts by 30%.
Best Practice 5: Trying Out Different Campaign Versions
Data-driven marketing includes using A/B testing, which means testing two versions of a marketing campaign to see which one works better. This helps marketers understand quickly what is effective and change their strategies based on what they learn.
For example, a company that offers financial services to other businesses often tests two different email designs to see which one gets more people to click on links.
The results help them decide how to design their emails better in the future, leading to more people engaging with their emails.
Best Practice 6: Following Data Protection Rules
Companies need to follow rules like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which help protect personal information. Following these laws keeps the company out of trouble and makes customers trust them more. Using data the right way shows that a company cares about its customers’ privacy.
For example, a large company that works with other businesses makes sure all their marketing data follows these rules about data protection.
This careful handling of data helps improve their reputation and supports their B2B online growth by making them seem more trustworthy to their business partners.
Best Practice 7: Using Social Media Data
Social media gives a lot of information that can help understand what customers like and how they act. B2B digital marketing strategies can use this information to make their social media efforts better, which helps get more people interested and more leads.
For example, a marketing agency that works with other businesses looked at data from LinkedIn to find out which kinds of posts people interacted with the most.
Using what they learned, they changed their content strategy, which made their posts get 50% more engagement from people.
Best Practice 8: Setting Clear Goals
Clear goals, or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), help marketers know how well their campaigns are doing. These goals are important for checking if you’re successful and for making smart choices about what to do next in your marketing.
For example, a company that sells software to other businesses sets clear KPIs for each online campaign, like how many new leads they get, how many people interact, and how many sales are made.
They often check these goals to see if they need to change their plans to get better results.
Best Practice 9: Smart Use of Resources
Knowing where to use resources best is a big advantage of using data-driven marketing. This means you make sure your marketing money is used on things that make a difference.
For example, a company that provides healthcare services to other businesses looked at their data and decided to spend less on traditional trade shows and more on online advertising, which was giving them a better return on investment.
This smart move doubled how effective their marketing was in just one year.
Best Practice 10: Keeping Marketing Up-to-Date
As things change online, B2B digital marketing strategies must also change. Using new technologies and keeping up with trends helps businesses stay competitive.
For example, a logistics company uses a method called predictive analytics to change its marketing plans based on what they think will happen in the market soon.
This forward-thinking way helps them stay ahead of trends and quickly take advantage of new opportunities.
Real-World Example: Learning from Akscellence
At Akscellence, we used data-driven marketing well, doing even better than our clients expected. For instance, we added a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that helps them see what their customers are doing and what they need.
This allowed us to adjust our services to better fit the clients, leading to happier clients who stick around longer.
Final Thoughts
To recap, these data-driven best practices are not only aspirational; they represent verifiable and actionable strategies that can significantly enhance the performance of B2B marketing.
By knowing and executing these B2B digital marketing strategies, companies can guarantee that they will not simply keep pace with their competitors but also outpace them in terms of greater reach for better engagement among target audiences.
