B2B marketers rely on data integration to drive higher ROI, and rightly so. For all channels to play an effective part in moving audiences through the user journey in a unified and seamless cross channel experience, data integration is essential. The more data driven your multi channel approach is, the more informed, efficient and successful it’s likely to be.
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How can integrated data contribute to multi channel strategy success?
Analysts expect the data integration market to grow in excess of $12 billion in 2022, highlighting clear investment trends and intentions in this rapidly growing market. For B2B marketers, data integration enables a more effective and engaging multichannel approach with a far lower risk of losing prospects along the way for the ability to tap into exactly the type of content that will resonate best.
What methods of data integration come highly recommended in B2B multi channel marketing? Read on to discover the ones catching attention…
5 data integration tactics to drive ROI
Trying to integrate data into your B2B multi channel strategy but unsure how to do so effectively? Join us as we take a deep dive into the best tried-and-tested methods:
1. Integrate first and third party data sources to uncover the best content intelligence to form a solid plan of action for your B2B multi channel strategy. It’s important to understand:
- what content and themes are trending
- what content is being consumed by your target audience
- what topics and categories to build into your strategy.
This will inform B2B marketers of exactly what they should be putting to market – allowing them to effectively engage and resonate with their audience through the right content and messaging.
First Party: Categorize the content you produce by topic area (e.g. Cloud Security), buyer journey stage (e.g. in-market vs already a customer) and format (e.g. Webinar). You can then split your analytics by each of these areas to understand if there are any trends emerging within your own content amplification. What are your top performers? Are you driving enough engages buyers into your case studies? What about getting more traffic to your blog on important topics that might not be performing in organic channels?
Third party: By extending this same logic to the data of trusted partners you can see what the market at large is doing. You can overlay firmographic data to see what certain types of company are doing (even your target accounts) and predict the performance of your content accordingly. Are you seeing a spike in a certain industry researching your solution? Redeploy your ad spend to that market to maximize response that week. Trend on the decline in the enterprise? Shift your content creation to adapt and change up those email subject lines.
The route to accessing this third party data normally comes through enrichment plug-ins on your website – but that leaves a big hole in what you are putting to market across your multi channel activations. Finding the right partner and running through their AdTech stack will integrate your campaigns and reporting, unlocking new visibility of these account based signals.
2. Data integration from every channel also works wonders for your content strategy. It pulls together invaluable first-hand insight that informs your content marketing team of the key content themes to focus on. This not only ensures you are getting the right content in front of the right audiences at the right time, but helps build better conversion journeys along the way by keeping your brand front of mind with timely messages. Multi channel tactics to build always-on, always present immersive content environments are key to achieving this.
It ensures message consistency across channels so that the overall experience feels unified while keeping your message clear and memorable. This removes any possibility for confusion around your messaging by reinforcing it at multiple touchpoints, prompting your target audience to sustain interest in your product or service offering.
Take email, for example. B2B marketers can gain insight into behaviors, interests and preferences of their audience as a whole and individually. A simple click on a CTA shows the topics of current interest, helping to guide targeting and enhance their understanding of where potential customers are along the buyer journey. Equally, paid social can help to highlight the ads generating the greatest reach and engagement; data which is invaluable for identifying top performing ads and areas for optimization.
What’s more, integrating channel data can inform sequential messaging to strengthen your approach further. It enables you to see what your audience have previously engaged with to support the planning of what to serve them next, to sustain the chain of value exchanges that lead to the ultimate conversion of ROI.
3. Integrating data sources to improve targeting through utilizing first and third party data. Looking at your existing customer data helps you build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to understand the type of prospect you should go after. First party data such as demographics, interests and behaviors go a long way in shaping your ICP thanks to the insights they provide around your potential buyers. The data is readily available to you, so should always be leveraged.
You can then do lookalike modelling through third party data to help find those prospects and hone in your targeting – enabling B2B marketers to get in front of those who match their target audience with ads and engaging messaging.
However, this comes with a warning: using just the built in lookalike tools within Facebook or Google ads may not be enough to ensure quality and targeting accuracy. Remember that bug data algorithms don’t know the context of your advertising and will lookalike potential users to deliver to based on their B2C interest categories as well as their B2B, which for most internet users may far outnumber their work browsing. You don’t know the weighting of the algorithm being used so it’s just as likely you are finding others with an interest in dog groomers in Ohio or avid unicyclists who follow Rage Against the Machine.
Work with data enrichment companies, or B2B demand gen specialists, who can overlay user behavior with signals about specific B2B content, link the user to a company, and lookalike based on firmographic characteristics. This means that you can be sure that your ads, emails and calls are reaching companies that are the best fit for your product and the decision makers within them that have intent in your category.
Targeting buyers at the right stages of their decision making with the timely delivery of content across multiple channels can significantly help to drive ROI.
4. Integrating data sources to provide one source of truth to support unified reporting. It’s important to understand the impact each channel has in achieving your overarching strategy so that you are able to measure channel performance and overall effectiveness in line with your objectives. Through data source integration you are able to attain the complete picture and distinguish key learnings from one central dashboard or reporting hub – an example of which is shown below for InboxINBOUND.
This allows B2B marketers to uncover exactly how their multi channel strategy is performing as a collective, to assess its success. From this, informed decisions can be made as to any adjustments and enhancements, aiming to boost ROI to its maximum potential based on solid data and facts.
5. Integrating channels with your marketing automation platform to facilitate nurture journeys. It’s crucial to focus your marketing automation platform around channel integration to ensure that the full demand generation funnel is covered by your multi channel strategy – minimizing waste, increasing efficiency and optimization opportunities all of which contribute to increased ROI.
B2B marketers can enhance the nurturing of customers and prospects purely by making sure their channel data around behavior, interests and timings of best engagement for example, are all being integrated into their nurture approach – using this customer data to effectively segment audiences and offer the right content on the right channel, providing an effective, seamless customer experience. Something as simple as trialing different send times for nurture emails and comparing open rates and CTR, or analyzing blog, video and infographic content to learn which is generating the most engagement can help identify best performing send times and content preferences.
The below diagram is an example of how to combine data and channels in a way which keeps your audience moving freely within your channel ecosystem, whilst continuing to keep them responsive and engaged across many crucial touchpoints.
A well thought-out and fully integrated data approach like this allows each channel, system and platform to effectively talk to one another regardless of their differing metrics and capabilities. A triggered response based on an action will provide a consistent and natural user experience, making all the difference to your ultimate ROI.
Final Thoughts
A fully integrated data approach in B2B multi channel marketing helps drive ROI as it encompasses channels and data to provide a unified customer experience. Through the 5 data integration tactics explored above, B2B marketers can understand how each contributes to overall multi channel strategy success and, as a result, improve reach, engagement and all-important ROI.
