There is very little room for your company to interpret marketing as a “soft skill.” With the overlap of marketing with tech, marketing with data, and marketing with finance, successful companies will incorporate a data driven strategy into the marketing department.
Below are a few ways to move your B2B company into a fully data-driven format – and the sooner the better.
Create a language that translates well throughout your entire organization
If you can agree on a common language that translates from marketing to finance, you will move into a data driven format much more quickly. You will be able to set goals that flow through departments rather than creating initiatives that get stuck in IT. Multidisciplinary goals are usually more critical to the success of a company, and thus more important.
Get your metrics together
If your bottom line is revenue (pun intended), then your metrics should not be as concerned with vanity as much as most companies are. It may be tempting to focus on likes, shares, or page time – we all know that. However, if you are looking to convert big prospects that usually take time to move through the sales funnel, then the metrics you prioritize should be more along the lines of informs, engages, and conversion rates.
Work to more precisely define an audience for your company
Why are your prospects really buying your products? The reason may be different from what you focus on. You will never really know unless you collect information. Moving into a data driven strategy means identifying the decision makers. Do not assume that all purchase decisions are made at the top of the executive suite. The motivations of the specialists who may be greenlighting your purchases are likely different from what you think.
Create all content for a specific purpose
Content for content’s sake is pointless in terms of driving decisions through data. Why do your users actually want what you are producing? If you define what you plan to achieve through a particular content deployment, then you can more precisely lay it out. You should also take note of the content that provides you with a higher ROI.
Eventually combine your creation, content, strategy and performance goals into a single initiative
There is no aspect of modern marketing or operations that functions on its own. If you are segmenting your data, then you are missing the insights that can only come from a holistic assessment. Look to quantify the actions that you take and note the impact they have on business. Even if you achieve a conversion rate goal for a quarter, being ignorant of why you achieved it will almost ensure that you will never duplicate it.
According to CEB Global, your prospect is usually more than halfway through the sales cycle before ever engaging your team. By the time they talk to you, they know who you are. What do you know about them? Let the tips above move you into a data driven strategy as soon as possible to remove this disadvantage. A holistic strategy that is purely data driven will consistently improve your customer relations and lead you to the results that you have been looking for.
