Dayle Hall, SVP of Marketing at Lithium Technologies is joining me for episode 2 of this UpClose Podcast Series to discuss an issue many marketers are facing – data overload. This five part series covers the five most influential topics for B2B marketing. In the second episode, Dayle explains how B2B marketers can harness all of the data that’s available to them.
How to Overcome Data Overload
The volume of data available to B2B marketers today can be intimidating. Dayle advises that marketers should focus on these three elements to get a better hold on their data – people, process, and technology.
- People – Hire the right talent to get and use data insights. You’ll need demand generation professionals and data scientists. Marketing leadership needs to work with business analytics experts to help craft the story.
- Process – Create a process for gathering, listening, analyzing, and improving your data. Each company as a whole should adopt a performance driven mentality and understand the value of data.
- Technology – Feed data into your tools and integrate at scale. Marketers should leverage analytics resources to measure traffic and performance. Integrate data into your marketing automation system to optimize campaigns, and tie campaign data to your CRM and active pipeline opportunities to run conversion analysis.
Harnessing the available data in your marketing efforts will improve your relationship with stakeholders. A successful data driven marketer will build trust and rapport with sales, which can eventually lead to sales and marketing alignment.
Marketing Statistics About Data
A Harris Poll found that 52% of Americans are more willing to share personal information with a brand/company if they can deliver a more personal experience. At the same time, 66% expect brands they do business with to know more about them today than they did a year ago. Consumers expect you to remember the personal data they’ve shared with you. Remember, customers are people and people aren’t data records.
Dayle points out how Gartner found that less than 1% of organizations are attempting to reconcile social and legacy customer data. That’s a huge gap to overlook.
A full customer view comes from combining transactional data, social data, and behavioral data.
How Post Office UK is Leveraging Data
The Post Office in the UK launched a real-time marketing campaign to dominate media for one day – #LoveSundays. Leveraging Lithium’s Social Media Management software they monitored and tracked awareness and customer engagement on social media. They seamlessly surfaced customer data, which helped them deliver personalized interactions both during and after the campaign.
Lithium’s Social Media Management software looked at Klout topics for a quick snapshot of the individual’s interests which they used to tie back to the Sunday opening message. If someone indicated an interest in gardening, it opened up the opportunity for a reply to the customer with an “open around you” message about them visiting Post Office before their Sunday trip to the garden center. The #LoveSundays campaign was a success with more than two million impressions on Twitter and an increase of 866% in the branch finder page views.
Data Integration for Full Customer View
If you listened to the first episode in this series, you heard about Dayle’s flair for style. On this episode, I asked him what’s in style this season for data.
He said that brands are starting to figure out that it’s critical to integrate transactional data, social data, and behavioral data to get the full customer picture. For next season he points out the importance of acquiring and KEEPING the talent that knows how to make sense of data. Consider them your LBD (little black dress).
Note: This Up Close podcast series is sponsored by Lithium Technologies.