Data can be the “D”-word for some marketers, but the more the marketing team can embrace their analytical skills, the better poised they will be to position their function as a key business driver.
“Invest time in going through the data, ask questions of it, look for patterns,” suggests Mason. “The more you learn about your buyer the more effective you can be when positioning your offering and winning their business.”
Businesses can come up with an objective view of what works by testing and collecting as much data as possible, the more granular the better, especially when it comes to engagement data. “Knowing which topic within a report a buyer spends the most time reading can tell you about the challenges they are looking to overcome, which you can position your offering against,” Mason says.
What kinds of information and data is typically missing from most B2B marketing campaigns? And where do B2B marketers usually struggle most when it comes to fueling the sales cycle?
“Marketers have been focusing too much on vanity metrics like download counts and clicks, none of which help you continue the conversation with a contact in a meaningful way,” Mason says. Certain data can reveal qualitative insights about a reader. Engagement data, such as time spent reading a given chapter, can reveal people’s interests, priorities and needs, which can help you paint a clearer picture of their motivations and where your offering best matches up. Sales can use this to structure conversations in a more personalized manner.
According to the Forrester study 1, B2B marketers tend to do better generating results in the early stages of the sales cycle. “Top of funnel results are easier to achieve,” Mason says. “The types of insights you gather at this stage are broad brush and less specific to your product offering.”
Say you run a webinar on IT security within the legal industry; you know that the people who sign up for the webinar are interested in this topic. You know from your signup form what their job role is and which company they work for. This is useful for nurturing contacts (sending them more content about IT security in legal, or stuff related to their job role), but too broad to drive a tailored conversation.
Marketers get better at analyzing which content campaigns are most impactful by defining the impact they want it to have and what the teams they’re supporting need. “Make sure you execute the campaign with the appropriate tracking and measurement in place to quantify that impact and then review and compare it with others,” Mason says.
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1 Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals, an October 2019 Turtl-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting
