Why Limited Data Is Limiting Traditional Marketing Strategies

According to Forrester’s recent Marketing Survey, unlocking growth and generating demand continue to be top priorities for B2B marketing decision makers. Amid the seismic shifts in buying behavior, marketing leaders will expand digital transformation efforts, and the volume of data will continue to grow.

Despite these changes and technological advancements, 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge. Over the last two years, a digital shift in buying behaviors, coupled with social unrest and economic uncertainty, has eroded the effectiveness of marketing tactics, leaving marketers to question how their strategies need to change.

For instance, a fundamental part of marketing is lead scoring. Not long ago, marketing could qualify leads by “scoring” them based on revenue, employees and industry sector and passing the best fits along to the sales team. But with all the changes to the business environment, traditional lead scoring models don’t work anymore.

But they could work if they had the right data. In case after case, marketing fails turn out to be, at bottom, failures of data. On the flip side, getting hold of new data—especially data from outside an organization’s four walls—can quickly right your marketing ship.

Here are three ways external data can help marketing teams better understand their targets and recalibrate their programs and some tips to help marketing leaders embark on the journey toward optimizing their campaigns and go-to-market (GTM) efforts with external data.

Marketing departments are used to accessing a collection of basic, static data signals like industry, company size, location, etc. for customer segmentation, lead scoring and targeting purposes. But access to limited information will only get them so far. How can they elevate their efforts?

Companies can’t rely on traditional data sources here. They need to cast the widest-possible net over different data sources from which to draw signals that correlate with their ideal customer profile (ICP).

Missing information on incoming leads means missing out on valuable opportunities. For example, let’s say you’re looking to target companies with HR departments with over 25 people and growing for a specific offering. A general internet search or a traditional list vendor cannot provide this type of information.

If you don’t have access to these specific data points, great inbound leads fall through the cracks. Marketing teams should invest in automatically enriching every incoming lead, then scoring it and prioritizing it to make sure no promising leads are left behind.

Understand what’s working, what’s not and why.

Marketing teams are only as effective as their data and insights.