Is data overload impacting your B2B efforts?
The days of data deprivation are long gone. Today, companies have become data blind – it’s spilling all over the place, making it impossible to keep up with its volume and variety. B2B marketers are continuously struggling with this unorganized data, leaving little time for real engagement with their customers.
Some major reasons for this chaos are:
1. Tool Runoff: The B2B arena is now filled with numerous tools and technologies, making it difficult to choose one. Data is also often spread across varied tools that don’t communicate or sync up easily, preventing everything from being in one place. And by the time all this fragmented data is collated, it becomes useless.
2. Data Decay: The speed of data decay is increasingly rising. Every year, 30% of people change jobs, 34% of companies change their names, 34% of people’s titles and/or job function changes and 37% of email addresses change. Keeping up with this pace is difficult and often leads to lost opportunities.
3. Trickle Down Effect: As a result of continuous data change, marketers’ databases end up full of inaccurate and unusable data. Poor data leads to poor trend analysis, and an inability to reach the right target audience at the right time, leading to lost opportunities and wasted resources.
Nevertheless, even if this data becomes clean and usable, it isn’t easy for anyone to realistically grasp and make sense of it. So what’s the solution? The solution is to first understand the type of data you need and how much data should be enough.
Let’s observe how to understand and use data rather than feeling overwhelmed by it.
Make Data Your Best Buddy
1. Decide goals based on business objectives: Meet with all your stakeholders to ensure you clearly understand your company’s business goals and the precise role of marketing. Accordingly, segment your customers, craft a marketing plan based each of those segments, and figure out what data needs to be tracked.
2. Demarcate relevant data, filtering out the rest: Identify the necessary data based on your objectives, and the data sources you will be using. Also, set a data limit and do not go overboard. Typically, businesses rely on third-party sources, previous purchases, referrals, web analytics, social media engagement, and networking efforts to tap into customer data. But all this data won’t do anything alone; you will need analytics to get insights from it.
3. Invest in CRM: A Customer Relationship Management system allows you to store a list of customers and important information about them. The reporting and analytics features of the system let businesses analyze trends, track key performance indicators, and predict your company’s future. Cloud-based CRMs can be accessed from any device with an internet connection, allowing any representative to assist the client by accessing this central data-land thus increasing company’s chances of truly nailing the kind of service customers expect and deserve. In addition, given the current context, it’s a good idea to use mobile to boost your CRM efforts.
4. Use Mobile to boost your CRM strategy: Next, integrate mobile into your CRM strategy. In 2018, 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3% in the previous year. Mobile CRM apps can help sales teams to access complete CRM on their mobile phone. Besides, apps like CircleBack can be integrated with your CRM to keep your sales pipeline flowing. CircleBack can help you organize all your contact data from your phone, email, social media accounts, and even your business cards in a single address book thus keeping your data clean, de-duplicated, complete and up-to-date.
5. Develop an action plan: Now your data is clean, organized, and all in one place. Also, since you now have a deep insight into customer needs and current trends using your CRM analytics, you can develop an action plan in sync with this information, delineating what you should focus on, what is the actual trend and what’s simply a passing fad. Then reach out to the targeted audience with relevant information, and evaluate your efforts. Soon you will be able to streamline all your hard work by using analytics and evaluating your efforts regularly. Data will then be your best ally.
In a nutshell, initially figure out the data and data sources you need. Keep a limit on the amount of data required and ensure it is clean. Then decide how to organize this data in a way that makes it easy to examine, understand, analyze and act on it. Then, use it to your advantage.