Increasing competition, shifting customer expectations, and complex buying group dynamics in the B2B environment mean manufacturers and distributors must up their marketing game to stay ahead of the curve. But how?
Delivering a customer-centric experience is the key to success: 90.7% of US advertisers and marketers apply data segmentation strategies to improve their targeting and customer engagement.
Thanks to rapid digital transformation (DX) in the manufacturing sector, marketers can tap into customer data throughout the customer lifecycle and analyze market trends to inform their strategies.
In fact, 64% of executives strongly agree that data-driven marketing gives them a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, 53% of digital marketers said the need for a customer-centric strategy had led their companies to invest in data-driven marketing.
Let's look at the importance of a data-driven marketing strategy and how you can design one that's right for your organization.
The Benefits of a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
B2B marketing is complex. In today's environment, complexity in digital marketing can impact revenue growth and long-term customer value. Lengthy and non-linear customer lifecycles require marketers to juggle multiple stakeholders with different priorities and keep them engaged. A data-driven marketing strategy can help you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time to build relationships and drive conversions. Here's how:
1. Drive Audience Segmentation and Marketing Personalization
You can create specific campaigns to target individual audience segments based on various criteria. These include company size, job titles, customer lifecycle stages, geographic location, etc., to deliver the most relevant content at the right time to accelerate the sales cycle.
2. Improve Marketing ROI
Marketing technologies allow you to collect and analyze customer data from lead generation through conversion to see what works and what doesn't. You can determine where you should spend your time and resources to market to prospects with the highest revenue potential.
3. Support Strategic Decision-making
Data analytics can show you trends in customer behaviors and preferences, so you can meet market demands and stay ahead of your competitors with a proactive, long-term strategy. You can make faster decisions and stay nimble in the fast-changing business environment.
4. Inform Product Development
No matter how good your marketing strategy is, your sales will suffer if the market doesn't want your product. Data Analytics can help you identify what buyers want and how you can meet shifting demands by collaborating with the product team.
5. Augment Customer Experience
You can leverage automation technologies to inform real-time customer interactions across all touchpoints to deliver a relevant and converting customer experience by integrating customer data from various sources and creating a 360-degree customer profile.
6. Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Customer data allows you to accurately score leads and pass the right prospects to the appropriate salespeople at the right time to increase conversion rates. Your sales team can also reference data on past customer interactions to inform their sales approach and increase win rates.
How To Design an Effective Data-driven Marketing Strategy
Companies generate vast amounts of data every day. To tap into the power of data-driven marketing, you need a strategy that aligns with your overall business objectives and identifies what data you need to generate the appropriate insights.
Your strategy and digital roadmap must address these three critical aspects:
- Data collection and storage (e.g., campaign tracking and data warehouse.)
- Reporting and analysis (e.g., dashboard and visualization.)
- Data activation (e.g., ad targeting and marketing personalization.)
Your technology stack is the backbone of your data-driven marketing operation. Build a solid foundation with a customer data platform (CDP) where you can collect and unify data from all sources to create 360-degree customer and account profiles. RDA's client, Pandora, unlocked new data insights to enable business users to make better decisions and positioned the company for strong revenue growth.
Implement business intelligence and data analytics tools, often assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, to generate real-time insights and inform timely decision-making.
Don't forget about data security, which is essential in today's business environment to protect your business-critical information (e.g., intellectual properties) and customer data—especially if you sell to organizations in highly-regulated industries.
Support Data-driven Marketing with the Right Digital Transformation Partner
Implementing a data-driven marketing strategy involves many moving parts. Most manufacturing firms simply don't have the internal resources and expertise to design a plan, identify the right tools, implement the software, and integrate all the data sources. That's why companies are turning to experienced digital consultancies to guide them through this critical transition.
Here at RDA, we believe no one should feel daunted when modernizing their business. We combine proven practice with progressive thinking to help manufacturing firms implement the right technologies to stay agile and competitive in the sector's complex technical environments.
Stop losing time, money, and momentum. Start building a data-driven digital marketing strategy you can trace, track, and trust. Get in touch to see how we can help you start your DX journey on the right foot.
