“Remember, great marketing starts with great data.” —The State of Marketing Data 2015
Digital marketing is continually evolving, and B2B marketing teams are becoming more sophisticated with every passing year. With access to new data and streamlined technology investments, marketers can now track results and leverage buyer behavior to optimize content, personalize communications, tie their activity to revenue, and accelerate deal velocity.
The future of marketing technology and data analysis is bright, and the present is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were just a few years ago—but there’s still a long way to go, baby.
Dun & Bradstreet NetProspex recently released their annual study on the state of B2B marketing data, which analyzed 223 million records. The results? Marketers don’t have a lot of confidence when it comes to their data.
Overall, B2B marketers rated their marketing data “questionable.” Not the most confidence-inspiring status.
Here are some of the key findings.
The worst score went to phone connectability, which 41% of respondents deemed “risky.”
This means that marketers feel the phone numbers in their databases are largely inaccurate, or missing altogether. This is a huge barrier when a prospect passes from marketing to sales.
The best score went to record duplication, which 51% of marketers deemed “optimal” and 39% “functional.”
Apparently, duplicate records aren’t keeping too many marketers up at night. Ninety percent of respondents are at least somewhat confident that their records are counted once, and only once—a crucial component of lead scoring and proper revenue attribution.
Email deliverability isn’t looking bad, but it’s not looking good. Forty-two percent of respondents called it “questionable.”
Questionable. Technology like marketing automation makes reaching prospects and moving them down the funnel with targeted, relevant content possible—but none of that matters if your prospects aren’t going to get that targeted, relevant content.
The state of record completeness varies: 26% of respondents called it “questionable,” 23% “risky,” and 22% “functional.”
To get the most out of data, you need to understand who is in your database and how certain factors—like title, lead score, or lead source—affect a prospect’s interests and journey to purchase. But unless you can gather that information, you won’t be able to leverage it.
Much of modern marketing depends on having clean data. Lead scoring, personalization, the hand-off from marketing to sales…without good data, marketers can’t reap the benefits made attainable by technology.
It’s time to come clean, marketers, on your dirty data.