Data-Fueled B2B Digital Marketing: Pretty Much Standard Practice At This Point

B2B isn’t the sexiest advertising –– it’s tough to execute, especially when your customers are living and working “online,” but aren’t easily identified based on their behavior.

If data isn’t driving your B2B digital marketing strategy this year, you may want to rethink your approach.

According to AdAge, big businesses started building internal platforms a few years ago to house and manage aggregated data in an effort to drive their own programmatic campaigns.

In fact, in a recent survey conducted by the Global Alliance of Data-Driven Marketing Association (GDMA) and Winterberry Group, 92.3% of respondents said that they maintain such databases to host their own customer data.

Small- to mid-sized B2B organizations that don’t have the means to host data can still certainly benefit from outside expertise.

Example: our media agency partner was recently asked to participate in an RFP for a project at a purchase-driven data platform that was in need of immediate programmatic support for their campaign management team.

This company captures and sells consumer data, and then uses more data to measure their own campaign results across multiple marketing channels. Talk about meta data!

Marketers have purchased third-party data like mailing lists and digital behavior data to support their targeted campaigns for years now, but the future has much more in store for this incredible marketing tool.

Data helps B2B marketers to better understand buyer behavior, and to better predict intent to purchase. The AdAge article suggests that by leveraging big data, B2B lead scoring, programmatic buys, and even digital content will become richer and more targeted than it already is.

The uptick in cloud-based marketing technology enables B2B organizations to utilize data from multiple channels, “ensuring a one-to-one, timely, and personal engagement with customers, with a never-before-seen level of precision,” says MarTech Advisor.

With this relatively new surge (and success) of predictive analytics and account-based marketing, it’s no longer unthinkable that B2C data techniques will become more commonplace in the B2B world, and it’s now more important than ever to lean heavily on big data to support your brand’s B2B digital strategy.