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Volumes of data are collected for every interaction in the digital world and marketers who have access to this data and understand how to use it to create a distinct, competitive advantage can provide the right offers to the right buyers at the right time. In fact, as per a story in Washington Post, brokers use billions of data points to profile Americans.
This handling of data beyond spreadsheets and reporting to actionable insights about customers has enabled everything from predictive analytics to marketing automation. This is reasonably turning a dream into reality and forms one of the many promises of what’s next in content marketing for B2B companies.
Let’s get a more detailed insight into the role of data in the B2B Marketing mix.
The future of B2B marketing depends on various factors including social recognition, online behavior and interactions, demographic information, content and sales force automation along with predictive analytics and marketing.
The explicit and implicit data will be used to perform predictive analysis in the future and score prospects on the basis of authority, influence, interactions and associations.
For example, when a prospect signs up for a Webinar, the explicit and implicit data will be fed into a predictive analytics engine to score the prospect based on the relationships with your company, content they’ve interacted with, and various other factors mentioned above.
The analytics engine will then feed the content and marketing automation engine. Consequently, it will deliver each content type the prospect is most likely to get engaged in the channel.
Predictability is perhaps the next footstep in the world of B2B marketing. Marketers are already making use of complex machine learning and data science techniques to recognize which consumers are most likely to get convert and which products to throw at existing customers.
This is going to expand to all the aspects of marketing and it will enable the marketers to predict which content will outperform its reasonably equivalent counterparts, which channels will convert the most, and which campaigns will perform best.
Although, as until today, marketing automation today is all about tracking emails and website behaviors, and executing email campaigns based on that behavior. For example, nurturing the leads. It is expected that marketing automation will use big data and analytics to know the right action to take at any given time, in the future.
Also, marketing automation will get big data from a variety of sources, like mobile or geographical location, social channels, and connected devices. Moreover, it will let companies interact with existing customers and potential clients over several channels including email. Not only this, it will be helpful in ad retargeting, mobile push, personalized websites and creating a custom social audience base.
Big data has a big role to play in the future of B2B marketing; and its scope can be evidently predicted too. It’s just a matter of time before the marketing world leverages its potential.
