B2B Data has a Marketing Problem
Marketing to marketers is hard, marketers tend to be more skeptical than the general audience, and marketing a data problem is even harder. Why? Because marketers are not inherently data-centric animals. B2B marketers like to come up with creative marketing campaigns and put together lavish industry events, they don’t like to manage their marketing data, yuck! Data management is for IT right? Wrong! As a marketer, if you are not going to get your hands around data, you are going to be short-lived on the job because data drives everything your marketing touch.
The problem of bad, missing and siloed data and its impact on B2B marketing is well documented, yet B2B marketers continue to neglect important data quality issues even when it’s costing them their jobs.
In the last few years as Co-Founder & CEO of CaliberMind, a Customer Data Platform for B2B, we’ve helped many marketers achieve their business goals with data, hence believe that our industry needs to re-frame the problem and the way we talk about it if we want to see marketers being successful with their data.
B2B Marketing Data: A Means to An End, Not an End in Itself
Most of the content and the discussion around B2B data today is tactical, fueled by product-centric data vendors, looking to sell you their Advil for your data headache. It’s full of technical jargon and stats about data cleansing, data enrichment, data deduping, data management, industry studies, analyst reports and what not.
If we want marketers to be successful with data, we have to understand that data is a means to an end, not an end in itself. In a recent annual SiriusDecisions Global CMO study that explores how B2B marketing leaders are adapting their marketing strategies to support their organization’s growth objective, CMOs listed insufficient data and lack of buyer insights as their two biggest challenges related to acquiring new buyers. You see the difference? Now instead of talking about data we are talking about how to execute your demand generation strategy with data.
In another example, we had a customer looking to execute their Account Based Marketing strategy, but their lead and prospect data was siloed in the Marketing Automation System, their buyer behavioral data siloed in the Content Management System; and contact and account data in the CRM; using our Customer Data Platform we managed to get all their data in one place, cleanse, enrich and segment it so we can properly score accounts and execute their strategy.
Awareness ≠ Action
Too many data vendors concentrate on raising awareness about marketing data quality issues without knowing how to translate that awareness into action, by getting marketers to change their behavior or act on their beliefs. The first instinct is often to make sure that as many marketers as possible are aware of the data problem. When we care about an issue or a cause, it’s natural to want others to care as much as we do. Because, we reason, surely if people knew that you’re more likely to die in an accident if you don’t wear a seat belt, they’d wear their seat belt.
That instinct is described by communication theory as the Information Deficit Model. The term was introduced in the 1980s to describe a widely held belief about science communication — that much of the public’s skepticism about science and new technology was rooted, quite simply, in a lack of knowledge. And that if the public only knew more, they would be more likely to embrace scientific information.
That perspective persists, not just in the scientific community but also in the world of marketing. Marketers frequently cite awareness, attitude, and action objectives. Marketing students learn that awareness precedes action. And many marketers still report results to management in the form of impressions — the number of people who were exposed to the message.
Because abundant research shows that people who are simply given more information are unlikely to change their beliefs or behavior, it’s time for data vendors seeking to drive change in marketing data management to move beyond just raising awareness. Instead, data vendors need to use behavioral science to craft campaigns that use messaging and concrete calls to action that get B2B marketers to change how they feel, think, or act about their data, and as a result create long-lasting change.
So let me ask you fellow marketer, is your marketing data holding you back? What marketing goals are you looking to accomplish with data? Is it basic campaign targeting? Content personalization? Or maybe more advanced Account Based Marketing and Predictive Marketing? No matter the goal, remember that your marketing is only as good as your data.
