Here’s Why You Need B2B Marketing Analytics Today
Why do you need B2B Marketing Analytics? The short answer? Because B2B marketing analytics is (and always has been!) crucial for grounded businesses looking to scale up.
…The long answer is, of course, slightly more complex than that.
Mostly because marketing analytics – for B2B and B2C businesses alike – was, for a long time, the odd man out of all other company performance data; after all, up until recently, the impact of PR and marketing departments was deemed much less tangible on the core business than other functions.
It’s much easier to quantify the number of leads your salespeople brought in last month than to pin down the exact amount of brand awareness your latest marketing campaign generated, right?
However, as data-driven marketing has slowly become the gold standard for forward-thinking companies (more on that later!), and the technologies used to measure marketing performance and efficiency have evolved, the reputation of marketing analytics has started to change.
Today, it’s safe to say that most modern businesses think of marketing analytics as indispensable to their journey to growth – so even if it took a while, it finally has a seat at the table!
In this article, you’ll find out:
What is B2B marketing analytics?
Why marketing analytics has become more and more relevant for B2B businesses
How B2B marketing analytics is different from its B2C counterpart
Why the ROI of marketing activities is a huge priority for marketers in 2022
What to keep in mind when setting up your B2B marketing analytics platform
…and more!
What is B2B marketing analytics?
B2B marketing analytics is all about digging into the numbers behind marketing efforts when businesses are trying to sell to other businesses.
It means looking closely at the data from all sorts of marketing activities to see what's working and what isn't.
This involves collecting data, making sense of it, and using what you learn to make smarter decisions about where to put your money. It helps companies focus their efforts more effectively, spend their budget wisely, and get better results from their marketing.
Why marketing analytics has become more and more relevant for B2B businesses
Nowhere is the need for marketing analytics more obvious than the B2B landscape.
As we know, a typical B2B multi-touch customer journey is historically difficult to map out and attribute the correct values to – yet for this same reason, it’s also the prime setting for the latest, fine-tuned analytics tools to do what they do best: organize and clean all that fragmented data, so that marketing analysts may deduce all the insights they need.
And because of this (relatively) newfound ability to accurately measure consumer behavior, campaign-related conversions and other marketing metrics, the ROI of B2B marketing activities is no longer shrouded in a cloud of mystery, but is as accessible as the ROI of any other function – hooray!
(Not to mention how these newly measurable marketing metrics also have a significant impact on sales performance, customer success teams etc. – but more on that later.)
Marketing Analytics: Data + Insights
Before moving on, let’s set the record straight: what do we mean by marketing analytics exactly?
Apart from the obvious – i.e. gathering data about campaigns and other marketing activities – marketing analytics seeks to discover patterns and red threads in that data to inform future strategies, campaigns and the overall direction of the marketing team.
It’s connected in this way to what we’ve said about Marketing Ops: both functions (marketing operations and marketing analytics) serve and inform the marketing team by monitoring the analytics tool(s) and then drawing insights based on the team’s performance results. You could even say that the data from these tools is the fuel on which Marketing Ops and marketing analytics feed off!
Why is this essential? Because this is the only thing that can ensure a marketing function that’s grounded in reality, as opposed to intuition.
Not to say that intuition doesn’t have its place in a marketing team! But in such a fickle business world that we live in today, where no one knows for sure what will happen tomorrow (hello, crazy pandemic!), data – good, clean data – is far safer to build a stable marketing strategy on than pure intuition, however brilliant.
Marketing analytics is also crucial for marketing teams because it gives them the ability to provide the oh-so-ubiquitous personalized marketing experience everyone (and we mean everyone) aspires to these days.
Whether B2C or B2B, a frictionless customer journey has become the Holy Grail for all companies living and breathing today – and the only way to remove all that pesky friction? By using what you know – or, put more professionally, utilizing the data about your customers to make sure their experience is as personal as possible.
The Key Differences between B2C and B2B Marketing Analytics
Of course, for B2B marketers, a frictionless customer journey poses somewhat more challenges than for their B2C counterparts.
Just as there are some core differences between B2C and B2B companies in general, B2B marketing analytics is, by necessity, different in focus and complexity than B2C marketing analytics.
More touchpoints in the customer journey
As we all know, buying a new service for your company takes significantly more time than, say, buying a new set of sneakers. More people are involved, both online and offline, over a substantially longer period of time – resulting in many more touchpoints to consider than in a traditional retail context, for example.
What this means for B2B marketing analytics: Tracking all recordable interactions of a (slightly fragmented) B2B customer journey – and by that, of course we mean the interactions of all stakeholders involved! – is absolutely possible, but you’ll need to make sure your analytics tool is up to the task.
Both the volume and the diversity of your incoming customer data means that your chosen analytics platform has to be powerful, adaptable, user-friendly and B2B-focused (imagine using a generic tool for tracking a complex B2B customer journey! Or better yet, don’t).
Account-based: a different kind of personal
Remember what we said about the ubiquitous personalized marketing experience? Just because it’s B2B marketing doesn’t mean it can’t be personal – after all, it’s not a machine downloading that report on workplace trends for 2023. It’s still a human being going through the customer journey (or of course, several humans), which means that being personal in your marketing efforts is still a valid goal - it just needs to be reached a bit differently.
What this means for B2B marketing analytics: This is a great area to support your marketing team with compare-and-contrast results from personalized campaigns – keeping an eagle eye on their performance not only validates their efforts in putting together such comprehensive materials, but can be highly effective when shown to management as proof that the current marketing strategy is working!
Playing the long(er) game
It’s not just the customer journey that’s longer in a B2B scenario – it’s also the (potential) relationship between the stakeholders and the company they’re interested in. If this were a romantic relationship, it would definitely fall under the “long-term commitment” category – and with this comes a new set of pros and cons, of course. One such con could be that it requires more energy and support (from your company’s side) to keep the relationship alive!
What this means for B2B marketing analytics: Obviously, the most heavy involvement of marketing analytics will be at the beginnings of these relationships, before sales and customer success teams take over – still, making sure your analytics tool can comprehend (and support) such long-term relationships with customers, even before they convert, is the most obvious condition from a marketing analytics POV.
Content, content, content
There’s a reason why B2B content marketing has been having a moment… for the past 5 years now! Whereas there’s only so much you can say about a single pair of shoes, in this case, the so-called curse of B2B marketing – i.e. that their products and services can be slightly challenging to define and describe – is truly a blessing in disguise: there are endless opportunities to create valuable content for all kinds of prospects, to awake their interest and keep the gods of SEO in a good mood at the same time.
What this means for B2B marketing analytics: The good news here is that B2B marketing analytics is the perfect way to constantly evaluate and inform your company’s content marketing strategy! The key here is to set up your analytics tool in the way that feels most intuitive to you, so that the most important findings (like how your latest whitepaper performed) are easy to find.
Less conversions – by default
The longer the customer journey, the more chances a customer has to stop, go back, or leave the whole thing entirely. Compared to their more straightforward B2C doppelgangers, B2B marketing teams typically experience a lower conversion rate when it comes to guiding customers through their marketing funnel.
What this means for B2B marketing analytics: Other than setting realistic conversion benchmarks for your marketing team to keep in mind, it might be a good idea to customize the lifecycle report in your analytics tool so that it accurately reflects those benchmarks. If you work with marketing automation, for instance, you can assign different levels to your leads to make them more relevant for you particularly.
The Secret Ingredient: Relevant Insights
As you can see, a well-oiled B2B marketing analytics function has to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to data. All those touchpoints in the customer journey, sometimes spread out over several months, encompassing multiple channels? It’s enough to make Google Analytics shudder!
But here’s the thing – data-driven marketing (B2C, B2B and everything in between) is no longer just a buzzword: it’s a way of life. Choosing to track just some of these touchpoints wouldn’t only put you at a serious disadvantage compared to your competitors – it would corrupt your growth strategy and marketing goals for the future! Just like you wouldn’t bake a complicated pastry without adding all necessary ingredients, it’s crucial to accept that you need all relevant data you can get for an informed B2B marketing strategy – meaning that your B2B marketing analytics has to be up to par.
This is probably why many marketers reported “measuring the ROI of marketing activities” to be their primary challenge for 2022. Since gathering data is now a given, the truly challenging part is drawing the correct insights, especially in the B2B world (for the many reasons listed above). Clean and rich data about your customers, however admirable, is not the endgame anymore: drawing the relevant and proper conclusions to bring back to your team, on the other hand, very much is.
And we’ll tell you a secret: this is the true secret ingredient that lifts B2B marketing analytics from “good-to-know-of” to the “must-have” level! This is what will help you hold your ground while intuitive creatives barrage you from one side and numbers-oriented business leaders from the other – your insights, grounded in numbers that stick.
Setting up for success
But how to make sure your insights are the correct ones? While there’s no one recipe for getting this particular secret sauce right, setting up your marketing analytics platform properly is more than half the battle, so why not start with that? We’ve collected the basics for you here, but feel free to expand and add to it if you feel we’re missing a beat.
Choose your preferred marketing analytics tool
Just like each company is different, each analytics platform we’ve seen so far has different strengths to offer up to businesses. Depending on the size of your company, the complexity of your customer journey and other relevant factors, you should definitely choose a platform that will serve both your short-term and long-term needs. (We obviously have a preference.)Get the support you need
The best B2B marketing analytics tools aren’t just about the software. The people behind them – from account managers to support specialists – are essential to bringing out the most of your platform, so go on, utilize all that expertise. This is especially important if/when you want to customize certain areas of your analytics platform to be hyper-relevant to your marketing strategy – like lifecycle reports, for instance.Start small at first…
Before upending your previous analytics system (if you have one), do a test run – or three. Trust us, last-minute kinks are part of the process, so even if you’re itching to stream all your B2B customer data through your powerful new platform at once, give it time. Choose a couple of stable customers to do a pilot program with, if possible – and don’t worry, you’re almost there!…and then scale up
Once you’ve done your test runs, and you’re confident that everything’s running the way it should be – the data from your pilot customers is coming in fresh and clean, everything’s clearly marked and organized, all touchpoints of your personalized customer journey included etc. – it’s time to hit the button and unleash this beautiful thing you’ve created. Congratulations, you did it! Now comes the tricky part: gathering those afore-mentioned insights…
The Realest Proof You Need
Before we sign off, one last thought: remember how we said that B2B marketing analytics isn’t just a necessity for B2B marketers, but it impacts other core functions of the business as well? (Sales being the most obvious example, but also customer success teams and higher management.) Without the insights gleaned from your marketing analytics platform, each of these departments would be missing a valuable angle to their day-to-day work: and if nothing else, this is the truest proof that B2B marketing analytics has a place at the table. And if it has a legitimate place in the busy ecosystem of a living, breathing company – well, there’s your answer to the question from the beginning.
This is why you need B2B marketing analytics.