DATA SMARTER B2B MARKETING COVER STORY
What’s the rush?
While B2C marketers may be knocking one another over in the rush to digital and multichannel marketing, B2B marketers have taken a far more cautious approach, held back partly by a lack of a sufficient multichannel data – but that may be changing in the near future, finds Antony Begley.
T
he B2B data market has slowly and gently evolved over the years to keep up with marketers’ changing needs – but that evolution has been jet-propelled in
recent years thanks to the explosion of digital media. For many businesses, the birth of mostly machine-generated big data, the vast majority of it online, has created more confusion than it has created opportunities, as often happens when fundamental game-changing shifts occur. As ever, B2C has led the way with its big volumes and attendant bigger scope for the trial- and-error approach – but how have B2B marketers reacted, and how has it affected the B2B data sales market? And is there enough high quality data out there to allow ambitious B2B marketers to take a truly multichannel approach? “The past 12 months have seen a continued surge towards multi channel marketing which certainly has a positive impact on campaign response rates,” says Chris Skinner, Group Account Director at Glasgow-based Intelligent Data Services (IDS).
www.dmarket.co.uk
“However the challenge for B2B data owners is having enough quality data that is available via all three key channels – mail, telemarketing and email. Naturally only selecting prospects who have these three channels available means that clients are potentially only targeting around 30% of their target markets.” In other words, B2B marketers who want to adopt a multichannel approach are potentially unable to do so with a whopping 70% of what is hardly a huge volume market to begin with. Having said that, IDS claims a B2B database that extends to some 3.2 million trading businesses with 3.8 million contacts and 900,000 opted-in email addresses.
DIGITAL CHALLENGE “There’s no question that B2B marketers are increasingly interested in digital channels but we’re not pushing them in that direction right at the moment,” says Marketscan Business Development Director Daryl Jay, also intimating that there simply isn’t always the volume and
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“The challenge for B2B data owners is having enough quality data that’s available via all three channels – mail, telemarketing and email.”
Chris Skinner, Group Account Director, IDS
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