Siloed data stifling B2B marketing efforts

Published in

DataScan

3 min readJan 28, 2018

Why second party data is king. Good privacy is good for business. How to tame the tech titans. Show me your data — the new precondition to M&As.

All included in this week’s digest on the world of data. 👇🏼

Why your data strategy is your B2B growth strategy. A Harvard Business Review survey, sponsored by Radius, found that “siloed data is the biggest challenge B2B marketers face when it comes to achieving their go-to-market goals”. Furthermore:

Over half of respondents (55 percent) to the survey said an inability to merge information from disparate silos in a timely manner was hobbling their initiatives.
Among the other challenges cited include a lack of analytics skills on staff (33 percent), incomplete or inaccurate data (32 percent), outdated IT resources (30 percent), or a lack of the right data or users not knowing what data is available (30 percent).

The survey findings also highlight the importance of companies using external data to complement their internal knowledge. This will” allow them to, among other things, more strategically target customers and potential customers”.

Why second party data is king. Alex Sibois, Managing Director, APAC, Lotame, discusses his digital advertising predictions for 2018. Alongside the growth of publisher consortiums, Sibois explains how second-party data will “explode in demand, driven by advertiser calls for transparency and clarity in the data they use”.

Second-party data is accessed from the original source, rather than through a third-party reseller. Whats more:

The possibilities with second-party data are endless. Advertisers can choose the data sources they feel are most relevant to their campaign optimisation, filtering out all the unnecessary stuff. This is where you can take data-driven marketing to a place that is not only unique, but extremely efficient.

Good privacy is good for business. A new report by Cisco found that “data privacy concerns cause sales delays in 65% of businesses worldwide” — with an average delay of 7.8 weeks. “Privacy-mature business” that have “stronger security protections” tend to experience “80% shorter sales delays”:

The findings from the Privacy Maturity Benchmark Study have clarified the importance of having good privacy processes well beyond GDPR compliance and have enabled the quantification of some of the financial benefits.
In particular, privacy-mature organizations are experiencing shorter delays in their sales cycle due to customer data privacy issues. They are also experiencing lower losses associated with data breaches.
This suggests that organisations should assess their own privacy maturity levels and understand potential financial opportunities from additional benefits in privacy processes.

Nice opinion piece by Gary Hayslip on data privacy as a growing strategic initiative. — 55% of mobile apps don’t comply with European privacy regulations. Excellent write-up by Natasha Lomas on WTF is GDPR?!

How to tame the tech titans. Write-up by the Economist exploring why and how the tech titans should be prevented from having a monopoly over consumer data.

A new system is needed to compete with Facebook owning “the world’s largest pool of personal data” and Amazon having “more pricing information than any other firm”. Otherwise “consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant”. One idea:

Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory licensing of a patent.
Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share.
These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation.