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How to Use Data-Driven Marketing for B2B Demand Generation?

Grasping the use of data-driven marketing for B2B demand generation is crucial for any company that wants to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. With the right information, businesses can more precisely hit their ideal customers. Also, data-driven marketing allows organizations to make better use of their overall marketing spend.

Why Data-Driven Marketing Matters

Marketing driven by data isn’t a mere trend; it is a necessity. Forrester Research states that firms that use customer data have seen 10-20 percent increases in revenue. That stat kind of sums it up: being informed pays off.

Also, companies that work with data-driven marketing can now have better customer engagement. By scrutinizing customer behavior and taste, businesses can customize their messaging. Consequently, they attract leads now and cultivate them much more efficiently.

When brands provide tailored experiences, the likelihood of consumers making a purchase increases by 80%.

Businesses that employ marketing strategies based on data yield a return on investment that is 5 to 6 times higher for their campaigns.

How to Use Data-Driven Marketing for B2B Demand Generation?

For B2B demand generation, companies can achieve effective outcomes from data-driven marketing by doing these things:

Recognize Appropriate Data Sources: Think of using Google Analytics, CRM systems, and the analytics from your social media platforms—besides any other tools you may use—to amass a range of useful insights.
Customer Interaction Analysis: Assess customer interactions with your content and determine their trends.
Develop Buyer Personas: Profile your ideal customers using information from the data.
Audience Segmentation: Leverage your data to carve your audience into separate, distinct groups that can receive personalized, laser-focused messaging.

Content optimization works best when it is a two-way street between you and your audience. Insights from your audience can lead to a more effective content strategy. Understanding what your audience is truly interested in is the first step toward creating a content strategy that resonates with them.

Optimize Content: Align your audience content interests with your content strategy, basing it on data insights.

For instance, B2B lead gen got better with HubSpot by using data analytics to refine their content marketing around the actual stuff read by their audience. They noticed what types of content got read more and what types of content moved their audience toward buying, and they focused on those types of content more (and on types they thought were more buying-indicative) to see a 22% lift in lead conversion over six months. In other words, HubSpot is an example of a company that is moving toward content that is more surefire. Here are a few more examples.

Leveraging Technology for Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing strategies can only work when they’re underpinned by technology. If you want to understand how your customers behave, you have to invest in the platforms that help you decipher all the signals they send. Systems like Salesforce or Marketo run your business intelligence in the cloud and give you the kind of insights that are practically mandatory in order to know your prospects and customers on a more intimate basis. Yet even these platforms don’t do the job alone.

As per Gartner, 70% of organizations are giving precedence to data analytics in driving their marketing strategies. This trend shows how important technology is for data-driven marketing. Companies that utilize these instruments can achieve far better targeting of their campaigns and far more significant returns on their investments.

Best Practices for Data-Driven B2B Demand Generation

Even though there is a massive potential in data-driven marketing, it is very important to implement best practices for us to enjoy the success that it can bring. Here are some of the key best practices that I consider important to mention:

Guarantee the Quality of Your Data: Clean it regularly and thoroughly to ensure accuracy. You get out of data what you put into it, and if a dataset is inaccurate, misled users—like us—can hardly do anything other than (mis)lead ourselves.
Take advantage of predictive analytics: Use predictive analytics to look ahead to customer needs and behaviors.
Keep an Eye and Make Changes as Necessary: Campaign performance should be continuously tracked, and when the data reveals something significant, the strategy should shift accordingly.
Prepare your marketing team with the right skills to dissect data meaningfully.

Organizations can boost their demand generation efforts and ensure they make decisions rooted in reality by adhering to these best practices. For example, when Zendesk started following these practices, they saw their lead generation effectiveness go up 25%. That’s what can happen when you adopt a data-driven culture.

Conclusion

To sum up, understanding how to apply data-driven marketing to B2B demand generation can clearly benefit businesses. That benefit lies in the way companies can use data to inform their go-to-market strategies. Demand generation is a category that covers a lot of ground, from targeted inbound marketing to pushier tactics that drive leads at the top of the funnel. Demand generation tends to mix these techniques.

Demand generation is definitely in the wheelhouse of marketing operations. Marketers can (and must) use the power of data to drive better performance.

The persistence of a truly data-driven marketing strategy can seem anything but simple; implementation can be downright hard work. But the payoff can be substantial—and certainly far greater, I believe, than for the half-implemented, half-ignored so-called data-driven marketing many companies today practice.

Why be data-driven?

Here are four very good reasons.