Is Your B2B Marketing Making the Most of Data?

According to b2bmarketing.net‘s recent Data Skills Benchmarking Report, nearly three-quarters of all marketers believe their companies are not getting the most from their data. The report was done in the U.K., but the fully 73 percent of marketers were concerned about their company’s ability to gather and proceed with data-driven information and listed is specifically.

However, 29 percent of them believe the data skills of their team are either excellent or good. 90 percent of them feel using data effectively is either important or critical and feel their teams continue to need improvement.

The head of content for B2B Marketing, Alex Aspinall, said, “While the fact that B2B brands and the marketers charged with their ownership are struggling with data will come as a surprise to fairly few within the industry, this research does highlight that now is the time to take control. Most organizations are struggling, but those most willing to start making inroads to tackle the skills and sophistication gaps have plenty to gain. We should expect these numbers to improve over the course of the next financial year, with data becoming an increasingly important strategic focus for businesses across verticals.”

Okay, so increasing your use of data for marketing purposes is a good idea, but what ways can it help specifically? Here are a couple of ways you can use it to increase the impact of your marketing.

Increasing customer base.

When companies compile lists of their customers, big data allows companies to search social media and other online activities to find common points among the customers. Once those points have been established, they can be used to search for others who fit those criteria, and then doing online ads on social media, targeted to those who share those common points with your current customers becomes relatively easy. In fact, if you can build a list of your customers who also have a Facebook account, you can do that with as little as 100 people on your existing list. Download that list to FB, click a few more keys and create a target group that you can immediately run a FB ad campaign to just those people. That’s one way you can use data fairly easily and almost immediately.

Use Big Data to tweak your products or services.

Big data can make it easier to spot the ways you can make minor changes and upgrade what you offer to clients to fit their needs better. Track individual customer purchases to offer them deals on what they have already loved from your company.Amazon does a great job with this, using big data to offer deals connected to what a customer is currently buying or has bought or searched in the past. For those products with a set number of servings or uses, they also remind customers when it may be time to purchase the next package. Amazon’s statistics show more than 35% of their sales on the website come this way.

Find an expert.

Big data is new, and it’s kind of scary for most of us, so don’t try to do it on your own. Bring in an expert, they’ll know the possibilities for your company and products, they’ll also know the tools that will work best for you. You may not need a full-time on-site person doing it, but you do need someone who understands and knows the answers when you are setting it up, and then probably once a year or every six-months review where you are with the expert. If you’ve implemented big data already in your company for marketing and other purposes, what tips can you share. List them in the comments, please.

There are PR firms among them Shift Communications and 5WPR who incorporate big data into their communications assignments.