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From sales to customer success to finance, everyone has an opinion on the best marketing approach – and odds are none of them align. Although it’s tempting to purely follow expertise and experience, there’s only one ultimate truth that makes sure your marketing triumphs: data.
B2B data-driven marketing takes away the guesswork and ensures your marketing grows revenue from the word ‘go’.
Read on to learn what it is, why you should use it, and to see real-life B2B data-driven marketing examples.
What’s B2B data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is an approach that uses content analytics and insights as the foundation for marketing strategy design and decisions. More specifically, B2B data-driven marketing helps businesses convert other businesses into customers effectively. The B2B marketing world waits for nobody; it’s fast-paced and tough to keep up. And in this kind of environment, there’s not a lot of room for wrong moves. Choose a marketing approach that prioritizes facts over feelings to avoid wasting time with ‘trial and error’.
B2B data-driven marketing makes everything from planning successful ABM strategies that make deep personalization at scale achievable to running data-led demand gen campaigns – all with better resource efficiency. In the digital age, B2B companies miss out on face-to-face relationships that reveal intentions and sentiments. Data fills in the blanks to shrink the disconnect between what we think buyers want and what they actually do.
A B2B data-driven marketing strategy transforms performance across many areas of your business.
Here are 10 major benefits of an analytics-first approach:
1. Less risk of wasted resources
Dig into data to form a fuller, more accurate picture of your target audience. With this knowledge, build highly focused content and campaigns that hit the mark. Say goodbye to stab-in-the-darketing. Data steers your strategy toward the most promising, ICP-aligned leads that boost ROI.
2. Hone in on your ICP
Crystallizing your ideal customer profile (ICP) is key to driving growth and revenue – and data defines and refines your ICP to help you target prospects with confidence. Understand your ICP deeply, and convincing, connection-forming marketing becomes easy. And the by-product of ICP-aligned B2B data-driven marketing is high-quality, high-intent leads.
4. Show C-Suite you’re worth your salt
Marketers are under the microscope to show tangible outcomes from their activities. Like all areas of B2B businesses, they need to prove they’re performing. A data-driven marketing strategy collects metrics that illustrate impact. Show marketing’s contribution to business objectives to make it easier to protect budget from C-Suite cost slashings.
5. More effective conversion content
Drill into your target audience’s frustrations, concerns, and knowledge gaps with data and analytics. Use these in your content strategy to create relevant, resonating content that converts readers. Want to learn writing techniques that inspire action?
Check out our guide to conversion copywriting.
6. Smart use of marketing budgets
Data-driven marketing keeps track of what channels are driving engagement and leads – and what ones are underperforming. With this knowledge, shuffle around your budget to back high-performing, high-impact channels. When your budget is strategic and responsive, you’ll maximize marketing spend.
7. Impactful sales enablement
B2B sales processes can be cumbersome. Sales teams love data-driven marketing. Not only does it quantify marketing teams’ commercial contribution, but it’s also a goldmine of deal-closing insights. Weaving specific behaviors, preferences, and problems into pitches helps sales deliver personalized pitches that show they’re a cut above the rest. Data gives sales the information they need to identify the warmest leads and start the right conversations. Digital playbooks, pitch decks, and proposals show teams exactly who is looking at these leave-behind documents, and who isn’t. It’s a follow-up game-changer.
8. Marketing that keeps getting better
Like fine wine and George Clooney, B2B data-driven marketing just gets better with time. Data feeds marketing strategy iterations – and with every optimization and experimentation comes even more data. These analytics and insights in turn fuel ICP refinement and messaging improvements, helping marketers push prospects through the funnel and close faster. When data-driven marketing matures, both output and impact move to the next level.
Jonny Soakell
Sales Director, Turtl
How to use B2B data-driven marketing effectively
How do you make sure you get data-driven marketing right? By adopting a cross-division approach to marketing. Whether it’s content, acquisition, or operations, they all benefit from analytics and insights to up their performance.
Create data-powered content
When you’re mapping out a holistic B2B content marketing strategy, it can be tough to gauge what content will make a real difference. Competitor research, legacy content audits, and common sense are good places to start. But it’s data that leads you to the topics that will truly move the needle.
Data-driven content marketing relies on data points like customer feedback, insights from other departments (like customer service or sales), and SEO analysis to figure out what content matters most.
This approach isn’t a one-and-done type of deal – every piece of content created should help to refine future output. To continuously feed your content machine with data, make sure to choose a content creation platform with built-in analytics and insights.
Feed your pipeline
In most B2B marketing teams, inbound lead generation is the ultimate success metric. After all, if you’re not attracting new prospects, it’s hard to prove marketing’s impact on revenue growth. It doesn’t matter if you’re spreading the net wide or pursuing a handful of key companies to speed up your ABM funnel – focused, relevant marketing is essential to bring in leads. And data is the key to getting that focus.
Lead generation and data-driven marketing are such a good pairing because insights make it easy to create tailored marketing materials that convert prospects. Relevancy is crucial to B2B marketing – whether it’s a freelancer or CEO of a large-scale enterprise, decision-makers don’t have time for generic marketing. Use your marketing to answer their questions, ease their worries, or solve their problems and the leads will start flowing.
Make an impact with automation
Combine automation with data-driven marketing for out-of-this-world customer acquisition. Automation actively fuels B2B data-driven marketing by making it much easier to track user engagement and gather valuable intent data. Automation eliminates repetitive content journeys and serves up valuable content at just the right time. And with machines doing the heavy lifting, marketers can focus on optimizing content using new data.
Many content automation tools sync up with CRM software for customized, data-packed content production. Data feeds content personalization – whether it’s surface-level with basic details or diving deep with prospect-specific pain points. Certain tools can even create deeply personalized content at scale – like Turtl’s Personalization Engine.
Using analytics and insights, a singular master document, and advanced automation capabilities, the Personalization Engine produces hundreds – even thousands – of highly tailored, high-performing content pieces in minutes.
Examples of B2B data-driven marketing
Enough tell, it’s time to show. Let’s take a look at some winning examples of data-driven B2B marketing:
HubSpot
B2B SaaS giant offers products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer services to help businesses grow. As fierce advocates for B2B data-driven marketing, their content, and comms highlight data’s importance in building trust and loyalty with prospects. And they don’t just talk the talk, their platform is a great tool for getting a customer journey overview and it delivers data that can help marketers with optimization.
Across their marketing strategy, Hubspot uses data to create experiences that they’re sure will have an impact. Whether it’s their community-building HubSpot Academy or their high-traffic Content Hub, their understanding of their audience shapes their marketing output. Even their landing pages (like the one below) use data insights to respond directly to problems their target businesses face.
Allianz Care
Leading international health insurance and healthcare provider Allianz Care has a hefty book of corporate clients – and ambitions to bring in even more. However, dataless formats like the PDF and a lack of insights were holding their marketing team back.
When they turned to digital documents with built-in analytics, everything changed. Instead of being stuck in the dark, they started learning from performance to make content that counted. And because they could review individual sections’ performance of every content piece, editing and optimizing in real time became a reality. Structure, messaging, and design could be tested and improved with ease.
With Turtl, the Allianz Care team was empowered to create high-quality, data-fuelled marketing collateral that consistently delivered results. In the first few months, their marketing materials got over 23,000 reads – and had readers in 150+ countries.
Their recent report Understanding Food Labels fills a crucial knowledge gap and gives corporate clients an important resource to share with their teams. On top of that, it strengthens their position as an industry authority. A masterclass in thought leadership for lead generation.
GiveSmart
B2B SaaS company GiveSmart helps nonprofits and schools to engage and secure donors with their mobile bidding and online donation management systems.
Before teaming up with Turtl, limited reader metrics caused headaches for GiveSmart’s marketing team. But with Turtl Analytics, they pulled back the curtain on reader attention and interaction.
The result? They understood what topics and content were resonating, empowering them to make more of what worked and to change what wasn’t clicking. With data-backed marketing, engagement soared and lead generation leaped up.
Using data and insights, GiveSmart created this interactive whitepaper that answers key questions and covers vital topics for its target audience. It’s a shining example of B2B data-driven marketing done right.
Turtl takeaway
Data-driven marketing doesn’t just guide your decisions - it delivers serious ROI. By making data the backbone of your strategy, you’ll target the right audience, refine your campaigns, and serve up content that converts.
Ready to see what smarter marketing can do for your revenue? Let’s make it happen.
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