Businesses operating in today’s saturated market face more competition than ever before, while potential customers are overwhelmed with an endless array of purchasing decisions. However, equipped with the right B2B data, your business can take control and succeed in this data-driven world.
This article discusses the various types of B2B data and collection methods, how to leverage that data for marketing efforts, and best practices for ethical storage and optimization.
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What is B2B Data?
B2B data is any relevant information about other businesses and their employees that can be utilized to fuel sales, marketing, and RevOps initiatives. Unlike consumer data, which focuses primarily on understanding individual customer metrics, B2B data looks to deliver a more comprehensive picture of an entire business.
B2B data can be collected in two ways: internal and third-party external. At the most basic level, internal data is information collected by your company (through email, website forms, or transactions). In contrast, third-party data is collected from other providers and assembled from various sources (other websites, apps, registrations).
We’ll explore those two forms of data collection later in the article, but for now, let’s take a look at six key types of B2B data:
Firmographic data tells you general company information such as size, sector, location, and revenue. It can help marketers and salespeople segment audiences and identify target markets.
Market data helps your business uncover market trends and top competitors in the industry to better understand the landscape your prospects are operating in and offer services or solutions to help them succeed.
Transactional data is used to understand prospects’ buying behaviors, sales performance, and the products or services they sell.
Technographic data tells you what products, technology, or solutions your prospect already uses. This helps sales teams understand the prospect’s pain points or gaps in their tech stack.
Chronographic data refers to real-life events that are taking place at an organization. It gives you a deeper understanding of a company’s sales triggers or events that present marketing or sales opportunities. Some examples include a recent job hiring or a change in leadership.
Contact data provides your business with the contact information of key decision-makers, including names, job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. It can be used to reach out to the right person and help you determine if that person fits your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
There are other types of B2B data that businesses can leverage, but these cover most of the bases. Gathering and analyzing this B2B data can help your marketing and sales teams create an effective, data-driven marketing strategy.
The Importance of B2B Data-Driven Marketing
In the past, traditional marketing efforts adopted a one-size-fits-all approach, employing sweeping, universal strategies. Without the digital solutions necessary to personalize marketing efforts, tailoring extensive campaigns to specific customers requires a seemingly impossible amount of time and effort.
Today, personalized data-driven marketing is king. Massive amounts of customer data allow marketers to deliver highly tailored campaigns, creating meaningful and individual connections with the target audience. Businesses that utilize data-driven marketing deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spending.
B2B data is regularly used to help marketers understand individual customer needs, target high-value accounts through account-based marketing, and identify shifting industry trends. This allows them to stay ahead of their competitors, predict impending market shifts, and adjust accordingly.
Sources of B2B Data and How to Collect Them
B2B data is a rich and potentially revolutionary tool for businesses. But everyone knows great rewards bring significant risks. That’s why it’s crucial to understand where and how to source ethically acquired and accurate data.
First, let’s examine some common sources of B2B data:
1. CRM and Sales Data
CRM (customer relationship management) data consists of four different types of data: identity, descriptive, qualitative, and quantitative.
Identity data, such as name, email address, birthday, and phone number, helps you stay in touch with prospective customers and leads. It can be collected through either internal channels (emails, surveys, or website forms) or from third-party providers.
Descriptive data helps you understand what motivates your prospects, who they are, and what they do. Some examples include their seniority, department, or educational background.
Qualitative data gives you an idea of your customers’ information that can’t be put into numbers, such as buying motivation, attitudes or opinions, and satisfaction levels.
Quantitative data consists of information that can be measured numerically, such as close rates, average purchase amounts, and revenue.
There are several different collection methods for acquiring and storing CRM data, including:
Phone calls
Surveys
Purchases
Sign-up forms
Third-party data vendors
When utilized effectively, CRM data can help you understand your customers holistically, personalize your sales and marketing approach, and spot pain points for leads.
2. Social Media and Professional Networks
Any business looking to grow should have a well-established online presence. But, social media can provide more than just brand exposure.
More than 5 billion people worldwide use social media, and a surprising 84% of CEOs and VPs say they use social media when making purchasing decisions. For businesses that engage with customers on social platforms, rich and actionable data can be leveraged and analyzed.
Let’s look at LinkedIn, for example, as it boasts twice the conversion rates of other social media channels. Marketers and sales representatives can gather ample information on prospective businesses and insights into employees, key decision-makers, and hiring activity. Data from LinkedIn can also alert your business to sales event triggers and emerging industry trends.
Social listening tools can also collect data from various platforms and online forums, allowing your business to monitor conversations and discussions related to your industry.
3. Transactional Data
B2B transactional data is recorded when a business or an individual performs a transaction. This could be a financial move, like a sale or purchase, or something as simple as a customer complaint or return.
Marketing, sales, and operations managers can use this data to:
Understand customer behavior
Identify trends and patterns in purchasing habits
Highlight growth opportunities
Improve customer service
Understanding prospective businesses’ buying patterns and preferences helps you learn what product or service would be most beneficial to them, their likely use case, and when they are ready to purchase.
Leveraging B2B Data for Targeted Marketing Campaigns
B2B data has become a vital tool in the marketers’ arsenal. When regularly maintained and nourished, B2B data can significantly increase marketing campaign reach, educate buyer-centric content, and help to build effective ICPs.
1. Identifying Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, is your optimal buyer. It’s the ideal customer for your product or service. When planning a marketing campaign, it’s crucial to understand who you’re marketing to. Your ICP should outline the type of customer that would most benefit from your company and its services.
Marketers can use B2B data to define ICP attributes, such as:
Company industry
Company location
Revenue information
Employee count
Demographics
Leveraging B2B data to build highly specific ICPs can help your company effectively engage and convert leads while improving campaign reach and performance.
2. Personalizing Your Marketing Messages
In today’s fiercely competitive climate, roughly 86% of B2B customers expect a personalized buying experience. Marketers must fully understand their buyers’ interests, pain points, and market situations to tailor their efforts with personalized outreach strategies.
That’s where B2B data comes in. Marketers can gather data on prospects to craft personalized content, serve them helpful ads, and offer relevant solutions to their problems.
Personalization shows your customer that you’re paying attention to their needs and working to provide tailored solutions and products. B2B platforms like Nimbler can help your sales and marketing teams automate personalized email campaigns and enrich B2B contact data.
3. Segmenting Your Audience for Precision Targeting
Once you have ample B2B data, it’s time to segment your audience and target your ICP. Segmentation is the key to personalizing your marketing efforts. It’s a must-use strategy that divides your audiences into relevant groups to allow for highly personalized messaging. This ensures your target audience receives content that is relevant to their role, needs, characteristics, and pain points.
Best Practices for Managing and Utilizing B2B Data
Now that you have a good idea of the various types of B2B data and how to leverage it, let’s look at some best practices for managing, maintaining, and storing that information.
1. Ensuring Data Privacy and Compliance
Regarding internal data collection, B2B data can only be collected and used for the reason it was acquired. This means that your prospects must have opted-in or been informed that their data would be stored. Businesses must share their data collection practices upfront with customers and leads. This means sharing your privacy policies and permission forms. This practice not only keeps you in compliance with data protection rules but also builds trust between you and your potential customers.
Further, the B2B company is responsible for keeping that data secure to prevent unauthorized access against cyber-attacks and data breaches. This means regularly checking for vulnerabilities and testing encryptions and firewalls.
Alternatively, B2B companies could choose a third-party data vendor to manage and securely store data for them.
2. Keeping Data Clean and Up-to-Date
B2B data is only effective if it’s accurate. Your marketing, sales, and RevOps teams can’t make informed decisions, forecast properly, or build ICPs on bad data.
Bad B2B data usually belongs to one of the following categories:
Inconsistent data: Data that doesn’t match or fit with the rest of the database.
Missing data: Deleted files or sloppy collection techniques can lead to dataset holes.
Outdated data: Without routine data refreshing, it can quickly become obsolete.
Poor data hygiene leads to reduced effectiveness, lost trust from prospects and customers, unreliable analytics, and decreased revenue.
To avoid bad data, it’s crucial to create streamlined and automated data collection, entry, validation, and cleaning processes. If done manually, this can be burdensome and time-consuming. Instead of handling this manually, many companies choose to turn to third-party providers for data management to ensure accuracy, completeness, and security.
Integrating B2B Data Across Marketing Channels
Considering the vast amount and increasingly diverse types of data available to businesses, data synchronization and collaborative utilization are necessary for optimal results.
B2B data from multiple marketing channels, such as social media sites, company web pages, financial transactions, public databases, and third-party vendors, should be leveraged in unison to provide a more comprehensive, holistic view of prospective customers. Additionally, you can leverage information collected from these channels to inform a data-driven omnichannel marketing strategy that works for your business.
How Can Nimbler Simplify Your B2B Data Processes?
Leveraging B2B data can help businesses grow and establish successful, data-driven marketing campaigns. Companies using B2B data effectively and responsibly can see accelerated lead generation, enhanced analytics, expanded campaign reach, and enriched customer insights.
Since B2B data should function as the foundation for your business’ marketing strategies, optimizing and maintaining it for accuracy and quality is important. This means you need to:
Perform mass data cleaning (updating out-of-date information, deleting duplicate entries, or eliminating incomplete data) regularly.
Enrich and refresh data with new information to ensure your teams are up to date on market trends, customer needs, and product knowledge.
Enriching and cleansing your data consistently can be time-consuming. That’s why many businesses choose a modern B2B database solution like Nimbler to automate data enrichment, cleaning, campaign planning, and execution at scale. Nimbler also provides secure and compliant data storage.
Get started with Nimbler for free today to identify, store, and leverage high-quality B2B data.
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