4 Ways High-Quality B2B Data Empowers You to Ace Marketing Goals
According to Dun & Bradstreet, 57 percent of businesses have experienced the negative consequences of inaccurate or incomplete data—also known as poor data quality. Among these painful and budget-sapping consequences are:
- Wasted Resources — Gartner maintains poor data quality costs businesses an average of $15 million per year.
- Missed Opportunities — Sirius Decisions says up to 25% of the average B2B marketing database contains critical errors that hinder both targeting and lead generation.
- Poor Customer Experience—Experian reports that 94% of companies say inaccurate data negatively impacts their customer experience.
Poor Quality Data Is a Killer
To put things in perspective, think of data as the lifeblood of your businesses and marketing efforts. Now, imagine bad data as a highly contagious blood disease, like Malaria. Sure, you may be able to function for a few weeks without any real pain, but once the fever, chills and vomiting kick in, you will wish you had opted for the $10 Malaria prevention instead of the $28K hospital treatment. Like Malaria, bad data is ridiculously economical to prevent and even curable when diagnosed and treated, but without intervention it’s costly to your business, and in some cases completely deadly.
Your Data Is Mission-Critical
If you plan to rely on your data to make informed decisions, target the right audience, personalize your messaging, enhance customer experiences, measure campaign performance, etc., you have to have high quality data; otherwise, your mission is doomed from the get-go.
- High Quality Data Is the Key to Targeting the Right Audience
The ability to talk to the right people at the right time, while providing them with the right content is often the difference between closing a sale or closing your eyes in failure as your competitors walk off into the sunset with what should have been a “done deal.” However, all this perfect targeting and timing hinges on one thing: the quality of your data.
Fun Fact: 67% of B2B buyers rely on content to make purchasing decisions
High quality data enables you to accurately target the right audience with your perfectly personalized B2B marketing campaigns. When your data-loving martech systems have access to reliable and up-to-date data, you can segment your audience more effectively based on factors like industry, company size, job title, geo location, past purchases, etc. Of course, we all know that narrowing your target audience, makes it significantly easier to deliver more personalized and relevant messages, which in turn increases your chances of engaging potential customers and driving conversions. In short, accurate targeting ensures that the right content reaches the right buyers, but you have to have accurate data to do it.
2. High Quality Data Is the Key to Improving Lead Generation and Nurturing
If your goals include generating and nurturing leads more effectively, you will need accurate and complete data to do it. High quality data enables you to maximize your lead generation goals by:
- Quickly identifying quality leads
- Eliminating leads that are a bad fit
- Leveraging insights on customer preferences
- Personalizing marketing efforts in a way that makes customers feel heard and understood
Fun Fact: 68% of B2B companies use lead scoring to prioritize leads
Accurate data is essential to your team’s ability to score leads and make sure that the most qualified leads receive the right amount of attention. Your data quality is also critical to your ability to track the progress of your leads throughout the sales funnel, and ensure that the right messages are delivered at each stage, so that potential prospects can convert into wholly devoted lifelong customers.
3. High Quality Data Is the Key to Sending Highly Personalized Marketing Pieces
Personalized content is the cornerstone of an effective account-based marketing strategy, and having high quality data on-hand is fundamental to achieving it. Clean and complete data on customer preferences, past purchases, and prior engagements, helps you create highly personalized marketing campaigns that dazzle your intended target audience with their relevance. Beyond sending messages that resonate, personalized marketing pieces enable you to build trust, improve the customer experience, and boost conversion rates. That’s what we call a win-win-win scenario.
Fun Fact: 88% of marketers reported a measurable lift in business results from personalization.
4. High Quality Data Is the Key to Improving Customer Loyalty and Reducing Churn
According to the Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by just 5 percent can increase your profits by 25 to 95 percent. The quality of your data not only impacts customer acquisition, but it also plays a crucial role in keeping all those hard-won customers happy, engaged and having a positive experience. Keeping customer data current in real-time enables you to proactively engage with existing customers, anticipate their needs, and provide customized offers and solutions. When you work with high quality data, you are able to perpetually enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall customer lifetime values (CLVs), and who doesn’t need that?!
Make a Commitment to Maintain Maximum Data Quality
Data quality is often the key differentiator between a successful or a struggling marketing department. The crazy part is, optimizing your data quality is not an expensive endeavor, nor is it time-intensive if you take a hybrid approach (martech tools + martech experts). At Sureshot, we use a systematic hybrid approach to optimize data for our customers. What’s more, we are technology agnostic and prioritize using the technology you have already invested in before looking to other data tools to meet your needs. To learn more about how you can leverage the data in your martech to your advantage, click here.