B2B Marketers Have a Little Problem with Big Data

B2B marketers are getting increasingly excited about all of the things they might be able to do with big data. However, they might be getting ahead of themselves. According to the recent State of Marketing Data report from Netprospex, marketers are falling woefully short of capturing the “small”data they need to effectively reach prospects.

Here are some fun stats (and by “fun” we mean, “numbers you could lose sleep over”):

• 84% of marketing databases are “barely functional”
• 88% of records analyzed were lacking basic firmographic (industry, company revenue, number of employees) data
• Only 35% of files analyzed were rated “functional” or higher when it came to email deliverability
• The average score for database completeness is 2.7 out of 5, which is classified as “unreliable”

The report—analyzed 61 million database records of B2B marketers—pointed out that these findings present a significant risk to the success of B2B marketing campaigns. There are lots of reasons why this is true, but one of the key issues highlighted by the report was the importance of segmentation. Despite how important segmentation is to success, the data that would enable it is missing from most B2B marketers databases. The report found that only 25.9% of records included industry, 18.2% included revenue and 19.5% included company size.

Not only is hard to segment prospects without this data, in some cases, it’s hard to know whether a particular prospect works for a company that will actually be a viable customer. The lack of this information leads to more wasted time and efforts. In the best, the sales cycle is still slower than it would have been with better data. In case you’re counting, that adds up to less revenue for your business.

So what’s a B2B marketer to do? According to Aberdeen, best practices for having a quality database include assigning priority to the most valuable fields and regularly enrich data. In other words, B2B marketers need to focus immediately on filling in those gaps that will help with segmentation.

Learn more about the importance of segmentation for B2B and how it can make your campaigns more successful.