Data and analytics are essential for any B2B marketing strategy. They help you understand your customers, optimize your campaigns, and measure your results. But how can you use data to align your B2B marketing and sales teams, and drive more revenue and growth? In this article, we will show you six steps to leverage data and analytics for B2B marketing success.
Before you dive into data and analytics, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your B2B marketing strategy. What are your business objectives, and how do they translate into marketing goals and metrics? For example, if you want to increase your market share, you might set a goal to generate more leads and a metric to track your lead conversion rate. Make sure your goals and metrics are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
When it comes to goals and metrics - B2B marketing strategy goals are B2B strategy goals. Sales doesn't care about "leads" and neither do other GTM teams. Get aligned with sales on expectations around volume, but also conversion rates (a proxy for quality), velocity, and value (is this a target persona)
In my experience, a lot of teams set too many goals or KPIs. What I’ve found to be perfect is using a maximum of 3 objectives and 3 key results. That way you end up with 9 milestones to help you know if you’re making good progress. The OKR framework is the most powerful framework we deployed when we were marketing our B2B product over KPIs because it was just a more robust system to set goals that we could measure.
What we've found is that it's best to align marketing metrics with sales and customer success metrics, as well as overall business metrics right from the start. Too many teams make the mistake of creating KPIs that are meaningless for executives or anyone outside of marketing. Your lagging indicators should make sense for other go-to-market departments as well.
Defining your goals and metrics is a crucial foundational step in any B2B marketing strategy. Here's why it's important: Clarity of Purpose: Establishing clear and specific goals helps everyone involved understand what the marketing efforts aim to achieve. It aligns your team and resources toward a common objective. Measurability: SMART goals are measurable. This means you can track and analyze progress and results accurately. Measuring the right metrics provides insights into what's working and what needs improvement. Realistic Expectations: Setting achievable goals prevents setting unrealistic expectations. It's essential to be ambitious but also practical in what can be accomplished.
It's helpful to track performance data in a holistic way. Far too often, marketing and sales pros focus on KPIs at one funnel stage (CPC/awareness, CTR/engagement, &c) and neglect to build an integrated understanding of how otherwise fragmented stats contribute to (or detract from) overall funnel health. If we want to drive positive results at the bottom of our funnels, we need to spend effectively at the top and in the middle. This means bringing multiple metrics into alignment with one another.
The next step is to collect and integrate your data sources. Data sources can include your website analytics, email marketing platform, CRM system, social media channels, and any other tools or platforms you use for B2B marketing. You need to ensure that your data sources are reliable, accurate, and consistent. You also need to integrate them into a single dashboard or platform, where you can easily access and analyze your data. This will help you get a holistic view of your B2B marketing performance and customer journey.
Taking control of your primary data inputs, ensuring your signal is strong and reliable -- this is an important, relatively new challenge for marketers. Traditionally, marketers have relied on apps, ad vendors, and even third-parties to supply this information. Going forward, it's important for marketers to act independently and take control of "atomic-level" dataflows. (Think, pageviews, referrer information, and other basic session intel.) Gaining this kind of data independence empowers marketers in important ways. They can audit channels and partnerships, make better decisions, cut waste, and, ultimately, generate higher returns on spending.
These data sources encompass website analytics, email marketing platform, CRM system, and social media channels, among others. It's crucial to ensure the reliability, accuracy, and consistency of these sources. The integration into a centralized dashboard or platform streamlines data access and analysis. This holistic approach empowers data-driven decision-making and enhances the effectiveness of your marketing efforts
Acknowledge that data can come from a number of sources and it's not always available in the format, frequency and quality you require. Build a wish list of data and work towards it over time. Use proxies if necessary and clearly communicate assumptions. Also think about how to incorporate qualitative, non-structured views to help bring data to life.
One of the key benefits of data and analytics is that they allow you to segment and profile your customers. Segmentation is the process of dividing your customers into groups based on their characteristics, behaviors, needs, and preferences. Profiling is the process of creating detailed descriptions of each segment, including their demographics, psychographics, pain points, and goals. By segmenting and profiling your customers, you can tailor your B2B marketing messages, offers, and channels to their specific needs and interests.
This should really be the first step in any b2b marketing strategy. Segmenting the market and identifying an ideal customer profile should come before thinking about metrics. Reason: before knowing exactly who you're going to talk to and about what, you have little idea about what to measure.
Segmentation and customer profiling are essential for aligning B2B marketing and sales teams. This way you can achieve: Targeted Messaging: Tailoring messages to each segment boosts engagement and streamlines sales follow-ups. Resource Optimization & Prioritization : Focus resources on high-potential segments, maximizing ROI for both teams. Data-Driven Decisions: Analyze segment performance and customer behavior for informed strategies. KPI Alignment: Set KPIs based on segmentation to foster team cohesion and shared objectives.
Data is key and we need to use it to our advantage as marketers. Our audiences have expectations and they expect communications, touch points and journeys to be tailored to them and their needs. I would advise you create your personas and then use data points to build them out. Consider technographics and firmographics. Next I would look at data I had in relation to these personas, so first party such as existing data from emails, website and customer interviews. Plus third party data such as intent data. I would focuses on extracting key insight from this to paint a better and 'real' picture of your audience.
Segmentation, the division of customers into groups based on various factors, is paired with profiling, creating comprehensive descriptions of each segment. This includes demographics, psychographics, pain points, and goals. Such practices allow for highly customized B2B marketing efforts, ensuring messages, offers, and channels are aligned with the distinct needs and interests of each customer segment.
There are many different ways to segment your customers and data can help build a profile but this needs to be used in collaboration with those colleagues who are interacting with the customers directly to refine and pull out the key factors that help determine commercial success (however that is defined). Also don't to be too prescriptive as it can feel restrictive when other opportunities that don't fit the profile arise.
Another benefit of data and analytics is that they enable you to optimize your campaigns and content. Optimization is the process of testing, refining, and improving your B2B marketing tactics and strategies based on data and feedback. You can use data and analytics to optimize various aspects of your campaigns and content, such as your headlines, keywords, CTAs, landing pages, images, videos, and more. By optimizing your campaigns and content, you can increase your click-through rates, conversions, and engagement.
As mentioned you should consider your first party data and see if you can add all your key data points into a better visual format, in this instance a tool like looker studio or power bi will allow your to visualise your data in a digestible format. From this you should be able to identify key traits such as best performing email, topic, subject matter, CTA, best time of day to send out comms, etc. Viewing data in this fashion will present you with a huge amount of insight which you can use in your marketing moving forward. This could result in more tailored and specific campaigns to a 1 to 1 ABM campaign, the devil will be in the detail you can extract from the data.
This process involves constant testing, refinement, and improvement driven by data and feedback. Elements such as headlines, keywords, CTAs, landing pages, and media can be optimized using insights gleaned from data and analytics. The ultimate goal is to enhance click-through rates, conversions, and overall engagement with your audience.
One of the biggest challenges for B2B marketing is to align your marketing and sales teams. Alignment is the process of ensuring that your marketing and sales teams have the same goals, expectations, and processes, and that they communicate and collaborate effectively. You can use data and analytics to align your marketing and sales teams by sharing your data insights, creating a common language and terminology, defining your lead qualification criteria, and setting up a lead scoring and nurturing system. By aligning your marketing and sales teams, you can improve your lead quality, quantity, and velocity.
Issues arise due to unclear communication, where sales may not grasp marketing's constraints, and marketing may not clarify its demand generation priorities and limitations, resulting in misunderstandings and conflicts. It is also common for marketing and sales departments to not align on lead quality. In my role as a channel marketing representative, I addressed these challenges by: 1) Aligning sales and marketing teams' goals and KPIs through discussions. 2) Hosting monthly sync meetings for data exchange. 3) Presenting statistics demonstrating marketing's impact on demand growth. 4) Actively seeking feedback from the sales team and explaining marketing's limitations, strategies, and priorities to foster unity and collaboration.
Working with a range of sales and marketing teams in the UK and US, this is always a common issue that arrises and its of no fault of either team. Both teams carry a different lenses and each bring a different aspect when it comes to insight and customer experience. I've always tired to get both teams onboard together. This is a key component when it comes to ABM and it requires both teams to be on the same page. The way i've tackled this is to get both teams in the room and to define a process of how we are going to work as one.. Go through an entire campaign and outline how 'we' are going to achieve this goal. Businesses that have aligned sales and marketing departments have an increased annual revenue growth of 32% (Topo).
To align your B2B marketing and sales teams using data, begin by setting shared goals and a lead scoring system to prioritize leads. Ensure data integration and feedback loops between the two teams to enhance transparency and information consistency. Leverage segmentation and content analytics to deliver tailored marketing content that resonates with potential customers. Closed-loop reporting connects marketing efforts with sales outcomes, offering insights into what works best. Establish service level agreements (SLAs), host regular collaborative meetings, and develop sales enablement materials based on data-driven insights. Track lead sources and conduct A/B testing to allocate resources effectively.
This alignment involves setting common goals, processes, and effective communication. Data and analytics play a pivotal role in this alignment by providing data insights, creating a shared language and lead qualification criteria, and establishing lead scoring and nurturing systems. A well-aligned marketing and sales team can enhance lead quality, quantity, and speed in the B2B marketing process.
The SDR role is critical for closing the notorious gaps between marketing and sales. Even if you can't afford a dedicated hire, though, managing leads effectively in your CRM will help. We also live in a world filled with AYCE lead resources like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo. This means a B2B sales team can always find all the leads it could ever want. In this reality, I think marketing supports sales in three key ways: persona, modeling, messaging (including sales templates), and data generation and analysis. Feeding these to the sales front lines -- and working back from the results we see there -- goes a long way to creating a neatly integrated sales and marketing team.
The final step is to measure and report your results. Measurement is the process of tracking and evaluating your B2B marketing outcomes and impact. Reporting is the process of communicating and presenting your results to your stakeholders, such as your management, team members, or clients. You can use data and analytics to measure and report your results by creating dashboards, charts, graphs, and tables that showcase your key performance indicators, trends, and insights. By measuring and reporting your results, you can demonstrate your value, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and optimize your B2B marketing strategy.
Data is the new fuel. If the Marketing and Sales teams are not using data, they are missing Big! The best way to read data is to Visualise it.
It is very important to share knowledge and KPIs between teams to create a common understanding of customer behavior and preferences. And in this way create periodic communication and collaboration based on data to achieve continuous improvement in the intelligent use of data.
Data literacy and interpretation, building actionable insights -- this is marketing's ultimate super power, it's core priestly ability. Done right and effectively, it's as important as the CFO's work. Signal fidelity counts for quite a lot now, as does data ownership and control. Get this dialed in first. Make sure you have independent, high-quality data flows that you trust. Then, focus on disseminating action-oriented conclusions through your organization.
Keep it simple, focus on key messages, you can always provide more data to those who are interested. Align data with goals and targets and leverage sales experiences to provide real world context. Both teams need to own and take responsibility for the outcomes.