Report: B2B Marketers Favor Internal CRM Data Over Third-Party Providers

New research suggests that B2B marketers are satisfied with the third-party resources they turn to for data, but they have more confidence in the information they harness through their own CRM.

The “B2B Data Market Industry Report” from Openprise found that 80 percent of B2B marketers who use five or more third-party sources for data are “very satisfied” with them. Nearly a third (32 percent) also said that they intend to use at least three different third-party sources for analytics in 2017.

However, just one-in-five B2B marketers elect to update their data if existing values conflict with third-party data. When respondents’ records conflict with the information from outside sources, 27 percent say they “keep both (records) and reconcile later.” This data suggests that B2B marketers still trust their own information over the analytics gathered from third-party resources.

Data May Hold Back B2B Marketing Automation

According to a report published at the end of 2016, low-quality data is proving to be a barrier for B2B marketers, specifically those who use automation.

The “Optimize Your Marketing Automation: Mastering Marketing Automation with a Quality Data Foundation” study released by Dun and Bradstreet and Ascend2 discovered that “inadequate contact data quality” was the most significant barrier to marketing automation success for 39 percent of B2B marketers.

On average, most B2B marketers were missing fields such as job title, phone number, website domain, and industry information, according to the researchers of the report.

“Your marketing automation system will work better to address the needs of your target audience when you use relevant, complete and accurate data to optimize your content and email marketing campaigns,” wrote the researchers in the study.