The Right Data Management Strategy Allows for Better B2B Campaign Execution

The delivery of targeted, personalized content has become more prevalent for business-to-business (B2B) marketers and sellers.

A thorough understanding of the buying audience is the fundamental backbone of the techniques and tactics many B2Bs want to use today, such as account-based marketing, programmatic advertising, personalization, targeted emails and outbound sales. But without a marketing data management strategy in place, B2Bs fail to understand the audience and have trouble executing more sophisticated programs.

Properly collecting and maintaining the right data is an important first step. From there, analyzing and putting those data-driven insights to work becomes table stakes. More advanced brands are using intent data and artificial intelligence (AI) to model customer lifetime value and implement targeted account-based programs.

Anudit Vikram, senior vice president and chief product officer at Dun & Bradstreet, said B2Bs can model customer lifetime value by doing “analysis to understand which types of companies are likely to buy and engage.” The goal is to uncover the attributes or features those accounts share in order to target similar companies or lookalikes.

Of course, that analysis will only be valuable if the underlying data being used is correct and current. eMarketer’s latest report, “B2B Marketing Data: Capturing and Managing Data for Actionable Insights,” explores data collection solutions and the challenges of setting up a proper data management system. The report also includes a “Data Management Glossary” that defines the types of data to be collected and what can be done with each.

What types of marketing data are the most valuable for B2Bs to capture? Internal marketing programs, internal sales and customer service, and third-party information vendors were rated the most effective by B2B marketers in a worldwide survey by Ascend2 and ReachForce in March 2018.

Data management isn’t just about data management. It’s really about having a strategy and foundation in place that will give marketers the ability to roll out an account-based marketing plan or personalization.

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Interested in more on B2B data management? eMarketer senior analyst Jillian Ryan, author of "B2B Marketing Data: Capturing and Managing Data for Actionable Insights," spoke about the main data types marketers are identifying and integrating, and the technology used to do so, in a recent webinar. Watch it here.