How-To: Get Data Right
“B2B companies are seeing an average of 15-18% lift in revenue as a result of implementing a closed-loop attribution system and then optimizing Marketing programs based on the more sophisticated analysis.”
-Tina Moffett, Forrester Research
The Foundation to Our Success
Customers have seized control of the buying process, so customer data is the foundation to our success. Indeed, our only true competitive advantage is to…
Use data to align and optimize our marketing, product and sales activities to meet the needs of our customers.
In other chapters of this How-To Guide we’ll talk about the ‘outputs’ of B2B data – how to leverage data to:
- Understand our customers’ needs in each phase of their buying journey
- Develop a comprehensive strategic plan
- Determine the right content to produce
- Optimize digital programs
THE FOUNDATION TO THE FOUNDATION
If we’re going to get insights out of data, we first need to implement the right customer data management capabilities for our companies. Here are the key steps to get there:
1. Make Sure Your “Tech Stack” Stacks Up
- Understand data architecture best practices for B2B companies of your size and complexity. This includes…
- Individual tools for different activities (eg, analytics for Website, Display Advertising, Paid Search, etc.)
- Integration of the data from these different activities into a centrally-managed data warehouse
- BI tools to analyze this consolidated data
- Assess how well your current data architecture stacks up against this ideal state.
2. Make a Road-Map
- Develop your data and analytics strategy and phased road-map for customer data management.
- It should be practical for the near-term and scalable for the long-term.
3. Make It Happen
- Build the right team – both in-house and external resources
- Understand the appropriate roles, responsibilities, skills and organizational structure for your company
- Align with your IT team
- Resources
- Implement the appropriate technologies
CMO Council Report
Big Data’s Biggest Role, Aligning the CMO & CIO: Greater Partnership Drives Enterprise-Wide Customer Centricity
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4. Make It Thrive
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Be the champion of your customer data driven approach across your company
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Keep the momentum in executing your road-map to continually improve and evolve your implementation
Tool set
– Holger Kisker, Ph.D., VP, Research Director
- Data Management Platform
- Web analytics tools
- Display analytics tools, etc.
- SEO automation tools have emerged in recent years to cater to the needs of enterprise customers. Most of these products are trying hard to make SEO more relevant and actionable to marketers as opposed to SEO practitioners. These tools continually monitor and measure SEO ranking and on-page factors for you and your competitors. Additionally these tools will integrate with analytics giving you an at-a-glance view of SEO traffic sources and highly-performing keywords.
- Tagging: Tag Management tools are useful as they allow for consistent data capture across multiple vendors and systems. This not only simplifies the implementation of tags on web sites, it gives you the flexibility to make critical changes to your data collection systems without requiring IT resources. Additionally, since these tools are serving actual analytics tags, many of these vendors are looking to offer value-add services by aggregating disparate data at the point of collection, further simplifying the process to obtain these data streams.
- Integration between disparate marketing technologies is a critical step in getting a deep and nuanced view of customer activity.
- Accurate cross-channel attribution will give credit, to whatever extent is appropriate, to both the assist activities and the ultimate conversion-to-revenue activities. This will help you to fully understand the complex Company Buying Journey of your customers.