Most B2B companies sit on a wealth of data but lack the ability to harness its full potential. With the right data enrichment strategy, businesses can uncover valuable insights and new opportunities for growth hidden within their data.
Data enrichment refers to the process of enhancing your existing data by appending additional attributes and information from internal and external sources. For B2B companies, data enrichment provides a way to gain a more complete view of your customers, products, and markets. With enriched data, you can identify customer segments, personalize marketing campaigns, optimize your product portfolio, and discover new areas for business expansion.
Despite the clear benefits, many B2B companies struggle with data enrichment for several reasons:
- Lack of data integration. Customer, product, and market data often reside in silos across an organization. Integrating data from different sources is a prerequisite for effective enrichment.
- Reliance on outdated techniques. Methods like basic data appending are no longer sufficient. Advanced techniques such as data modeling, third-party data integration, and re-engagement campaigns are needed.
- Failure to leverage external data. Internal data only provides part of the picture. External data sources can help fill in the gaps to provide a 360-degree view of your customers, products, and markets.
- Lack of a systematic approach. Data enrichment requires more than a one-off project. Companies need a well-defined strategy and process for continuously enriching data over time.
- Unclear business objectives. Without concrete goals for data enrichment, efforts can lack direction and yield limited results. Companies must align on key objectives such as improving data quality, gaining customer insights, and identifying growth opportunities.
With a strategic approach to data enrichment, B2B companies can overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of their data. Enriched data translates to enriched customer experiences, more impactful marketing, and accelerated business growth. Data enrichment is no longer a "nice to have"—it is a prerequisite for success in today's data-driven business landscape.
The Rise of Data-Driven B2B Marketing
B2B marketing has traditionally been an imprecise discipline, relying more on intuition and experience than hard data. However, in the last decade, data-driven marketing has transformed how B2B companies make decisions and connect with customers. Using data analytics and business intelligence, marketers can now identify target audiences, personalize messaging, and optimize campaigns based on facts, not hunches.
Data enrichment is the next frontier for data-driven B2B marketing. And benefits are quite clear – Forbes’ findings show that the B2B sales pipelines gain about 14.5% more SQLs thanks to data enrichment. Find more about Data Enrichment for B2B from our overview piece.
By combining data from internal systems like CRM and marketing automation platforms with external data sources, marketers can develop a 360-degree view of their customers and markets. This holistic perspective helps marketers understand their customers' needs, priorities, and journey in a much more sophisticated way.
With data enrichment, B2B marketers can:
- Gain visibility into customer pain points, challenges, and triggers. Marketers can leverage data to determine which events or scenarios are most likely to drive a need for their products and solutions.
- Uncover new customer segments for micro-targeting. By analyzing firmographic, technographic, and intent data, marketers may identify niche segments that would benefit from tailored messaging and offers.
- Personalize the customer experience at scale. Using predictive analytics on enriched data, marketers can determine the topics, content, products, and offers most relevant for each customer and serve them up at the optimal time.
- Track the impact of campaigns and optimize in real time. With an integrated view of the customer journey across channels, marketers can see how customers respond to campaigns and make adjustments to improve performance, even as campaigns are still running.
- Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Enriched data provides visibility into which products or features each customer may need next based on their characteristics and behavior. Marketers can prompt sales teams with highly relevant upsell and cross-sell recommendations.
3 Key Goals of B2B Data Enrichment
A robust B2B data enrichment strategy should aim to achieve three key goals:
1. Improve data quality and completeness. Enriching your data with additional attributes and filling in missing values can help address issues like inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete data that many B2B companies face. Techniques such as data merging and third-party data integration can be used to verify, update, and append new data to your existing records. The end result is a single customer view with a more complete set of attributes to power your marketing and sales efforts.
2. Gain customer insights for micro-segmentation. Enriched data provides a deeper understanding of your customers and their key attributes. This enables more precise segmentation and targeting based on factors such as industry, company size, location, technologies used, and more. Micro-segmentation allows you to tailor messaging and personalize experiences for your customers. It also ensures that sales reps have the insights they need to have higher quality conversations.
3. Identify new opportunities for growth. Data enrichment exposes opportunities that you can’t see with your internal data alone. Integrating third-party data sources provides a broader view of your market, customers, and products. You may find pockets of high-value customers to target, adjacent segments to expand into, or ways to optimize your product portfolio. Growth opportunities could exist in new customer segments, new markets, new products, or boosting customer lifetime value.
With the massive amounts of data available today, the possibilities for enrichment are endless. However, it’s important to focus on high-impact areas that align with key business goals. Start with Contact Database Enrichment as explained in this guide.
Evaluating and Integrating External Data Sources
Not all external data sources are created equal. It is important to evaluate data sources based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, cost, and terms of use before integrating them into your systems.
Accuracy refers to how correct and up-to-date the data is. Inaccurate data can lead to poor insights and bad decision-making. Look for data sources that clearly state their data collection and verification methods.
Completeness refers to how much of your target data is covered. For enriching customer data, look for sources with a high percentage of your customers included. For market data, look for sources that provide the deepest level of granularity and segmentation.
Cost includes any fees to access and use the data. Make sure costs are reasonable for the value and ROI the data can provide. Some data sources offer tiered access at different price points. Start with a lower tier before investing in more robust data.
Terms of use refer to any restrictions on how the data can be used and shared. Look for “unrestricted use” data sources that allow you to fully integrate the data into your systems and share insights both internally and externally. Restrictive terms of use can limit the benefits of the data.
Recommended data sources for B2B customer data include D&B Hoovers, ZoomInfo, and DiscoverOrg. For product data, options include Gartner and IDC. For market data, consider Statista, Forrester, and McKinsey.
To properly integrate external data sources, map the source data to your internal data model and schemas. Use matching keys such as company name, address, and industry codes to connect records from different sources. Combine data at the record level to gain a single view of the customer, product, or market. Continuously validate integrated data and re-check source accuracy to ensure high data quality over time.
How Data Enrichment Uncovers New Growth Opportunities
With enriched data, you can uncover new opportunities for growth that have been hidden from plain sight. See how B2B companies have leveraged data enrichment to discover new customer segments, expand into adjacent markets, optimize their product portfolio, and boost customer lifetime value. Data is the new currency for growth.
Enriched customer data enables you to identify new customer segments and micro-segments based on attributes like demographics, behaviors, and preferences. You can then tailor marketing campaigns and product offerings to each segment. For example, a technology company enriched their customer data with firmographic details and discovered a new segment of small but fast-growing businesses. They launched a new product bundle targeted specifically at this segment, which became their fastest growing product line.
Enriched market and product data allows you to spot opportunities in adjacent markets. By analyzing trends across markets and seeing connections between products, you can find natural extensions of your product line that your customers will value. A manufacturing company integrated third-party data on industry trends and forecasts with their product sales data. They realized one of their products was popular in an unexpected market segment, leading them to develop a new product variant targeted at that segment. It opened up an entire new market for them.
Data enrichment also helps optimize your product portfolio by identifying high- and low-performing products. You can double down on the winners, make strategic changes to improve underperforming products, and cut products that are bleeding money. A software company used enriched data to analyze their product portfolio's market fit, revenue, and growth potential. They identified two underperforming products to discontinue, freeing up resources to invest in their top-performing products.
Finally, enriched customer data, especially data on customer lifetime value (CLV) metrics, shows you how to maximize the value of your existing customers. You can tailor retention campaigns to high-CLV segments, upsell and cross-sell based on needs and behaviors, and focus expansion into new markets where you have the most valuable customers.
Learn the tried-and-true customer retention practices from our list of 5 tested lead nurturing tactics.
Data enrichment is key to uncovering the growth opportunities hidden within your business. With the right data and insights, you can find new ways to reach your full potential and gain a competitive advantage. What growth opportunities will your data reveal?
Why Primer for B2B Data Enrichment
Primer fosters full-scale B2B data orchestration as it supplies your ABM moves with rich data aggregated from 10+ data providers. Through identity resolution and data enrichment, you get your audience prospecting as close to ICP as possible and bring in high-value customers who convert and stay engaged.
Extend your ABM marketing and nurture strategic alignment between marketing and sales teams. Contact our growth experts to get a free Primer live demo presentation today!
