When it comes to areas of importance for operating businesses in the technology field, you’d be hard-pressed to find an area more important than the digital marketing team. I say that because the digital marketing team is constantly tasked with answering some of the most difficult questions, often without access to accurate and trustworthy data. To be perfectly clear, I’m not implying that it is their fault.
The primary issue stems from the plethora of digital marketing technologies that make up the marketing technology stack. Nearly every B2B technology-based company has the same core needs and nearly identical work processes. The tools themselves vary, but the fact is most of the tools do not provide a complete, in-depth view of the customer, journey, or attribution. Making matters worse, each tool is siloed and incomplete. Since the data is siloed and incomplete, the burden falls back to the digital marketing team to figure out how to get the different systems integrated. Ultimately, even if the data is brought into a single system, it will still be incomplete. This leaves the digital marketing team unable to answer the hardest questions.
These hard questions often include: “Who comprises our target buying committee?” and “Where should we be spending our [time, money, resources] to acquire new customers?”
On the surface, these questions seem innocuous, but the complexities lie with that incomplete data. Take the question about how to acquire new customers. This requires attracting them to the site and moving them through the buying journey. Starting at the beginning of that journey, if you do not have complete and accurate attribution of those inbound leads, then you won’t know if your resources are adequately allocated. Everyone that I talk to has this problem to varying degrees. A digital ad is placed, and a user clicks on it. Tracking tags show up in this url, so you know how the user got to your “Request a Demo” page, and now you want them to fill out the form and submit it. The reality is the user often wants to learn a little more before submitting that form. What happens when the user navigates away from that page to read more about your company? Perhaps they like what they read and decide they would like a demo. Hey, would you look at that, “Request a Demo” is a button at the top of the site! Great, I would like a demo now. Here lies the problem. The form was filled, but no credit goes to the ad that got them to your website. Money well spent, except you don’t know it was money well spent because the form gets improperly attributed. That is a big problem.
Looking a little deeper, this problem isn’t purely a data silo problem; it is much bigger. Disconnected systems, each operating their own slice of marketing, leave gaps. Let’s consider videos on your website. There is a huge volume of data created from people watching videos. If you host your videos in a system such as YouTube or Vimeo, you probably see very basic stats on how many viewers, how much they watched, etc… Those stats are not in the context of your actual onsite user behavior. This is a big data gap. Knowing what users consume and what is moving them through their journey is what you need to drive your marketing and sales operations.
Most B2B technology companies, even in the early stages, will have 5 to 15 different tools in their stack. Managing these takes time; paying for them is a different thing. Research by Gartner has even shown that of all the tools these businesses are using, they only utilize about a third of all the capabilities provided by the service. This translates into lots of overhead with managing these systems while not addressing the very important data gaps.
There are a lot of third-party SaaS-based offerings which can help bring the data into a single location from a variety of different systems to simplify getting answers to many of the questions that are posed to the digital marketing organizations. That approach cannot solve the data gaps problem; it just adds another layer to the cost structure and management of the technology stack.
Given the importance of this critical data problem, I think a shift is starting. A new technology category called Generative CMS is developing and solving the data gaps problem. As more organizations migrate their marketing technology stack to this new approach, they will close the data gap by leveraging a system built on first-party data, integrating AI into marketing workflows to streamline content production, and, most importantly, delivering answers to the most challenging analytical questions faced by marketing teams.