B2B Marketers Struggle With Data as Personalization Efforts Increase

As B2B marketers look to increase personalization efforts for customers, a study by Informatica and Ascend2 shows data integration across platforms and data quality remain significant barriers to success.

About half of marketers (48 percent) are also struggling with measuring data-driven marketing ROI.

The study’s authors noted how these top challenges are dependent on each other. “For enriched data to have any significant impact on marketing performance it must be seamlessly integrated across marketers’ technology platforms,” the report states.

Additionally, the study found data-driven personalized marketing becomes more critical as sales cycles become more complex. According to the survey, 73 percent of B2B marketers most frequently encounter complex sales with long cycles and many influencers.

B2B marketers surveyed indicate the effectiveness of data-driven personalized marketing is increasing. A remarkable 95 percent says effectiveness is “increasing significantly” or “increasing marginally.”

When asked about specific data-driven personalization tactics that are the most challenging, web content personalization (57 percent) and lead intelligence collection (56 percent) were the two top answers. As a result, about 80 percent of respondents indicate they’ve leveraged outside expertise to implement personalized marketing tactics.

Data-Driven Marketing Top Strategic Priority in 2016

A joint Econsultancy and Adobe study, the “2016 Digital Trends” report, discovered more than half (53 percent) of marketing professionals placed data-driven marketing as a top strategic priority in 2016.

Personalization (31 percent), content optimization (29 percent) and social media management (25 percent) were named as top goals for the year by marketers looking to provide a unique customer experience.

About 20 percent of marketers indicated optimizing the customer experience is the most exciting opportunity for the coming year. Creating compelling content for digital experiences and data-driven marketing were the other top opportunities.