Low-Quality Data and Strategic Development Hamper B2B Marketing Automation Success

A recent report found that the majority of B2B marketers currently use marketing automation to some extent and consider it to be very important to the overall performance of marketing. However, many marketers still struggle with data quality and strategy creation.

The research from Dun & Bradstreet and Ascend2 titled “Optimize Your Marketing Automation: Mastering Marketing Automation with a Quality Data Foundation,” found that 32 percent of marketers are only using marketing automation to a limited extent, despite its potential to streamline complex processes and data across channels. The reason for this may be a lack of effective strategy (49 percent) and inadequate contact data quality (39 percent).

According to researchers, the average marketing database is missing complete and accurate information such as job title, phone number, website domain, industry info and more. “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.”

The most important goals of a marketing automation strategy include improving lead nurturing (63 percent), increasing lead generation (59 percent) and increasing sales revenue (46 percent).

When asked how successful marketing automation is for achieving these goals, 64 percent of marketers said “somewhat successful” and 31 percent said “very successful.”

The authors note that building a complete and accurate marketing database will lead to more actionable insights about target audience segments, and therefore improve strategy performance. 

Study Finds Marketing Automation Vital to Overall Performance

Another recent survey from Three Deep and Ascend2 found 94 percent of marketers successfully using marketing automation systems report that it’s a vital component to overall marketing performance.

The study also found that the majority (63 percent) of very successful companies surveyed are using marketing automation systems extensively. That being said, many companies were still affected by barriers to marketing automation success, including a lack of an effective strategy (58 percent), marketing-sales alignment (42 percent) and complexity of the system (42 percent).

In order to overcome these challenges, three-quarters of surveyed companies leveraged an outside specialist to assist in designing a marketing automation strategy.