“Data are the mainstay of successful marketing"

In an exclusive interview with cmoatwork.com, Utz Wasner, Chief Data Officer at the B2B Media Group, explains how data change marketing and how marketers can take advantage of this change.

 

 

In the past, we had billboards, and the advent of the internet saw the emergence of website-specific banners. But it seems that we have a long way to go yet. Are data the future of marketing? And what does this mean for marketers?

 

Data are the mainstay of successful marketing – this is likely to be even more true in the future. And so the topic of data is difficult to get away from these days.

 

For marketers, this means they need to have even more data expertise in the future in order to filter out relevant information from the overabundance of available data. Being able to learn the right lessons from this means to noticeably improve your marketing campaigns and make them more precise.

 

 

There is a lot of talk about data. But how exactly can I use these data in online marketing?

 

Data can be used in all stages of online marketing: from understanding the buyer persona and designing the campaign to target group-specific advertising materials. As a general rule: Set your goal first and then see if data can help you reach it. And in the vast majority of cases they can.

 

 

And where do these data come from?

 

These days, it is quite easy to collect data (in anonymised form) on certain B2B groups such as purchasing managers in the IT or industrial sector using cookies. If cookies contain account-specific information such as company size, then they can be used to precisely target your audience.

 

 

The General Data Protection Regulation comes into force in May. What is the situation regarding data privacy?

 

If the specifications of the General Data Protection Regulation are observed in the collection, processing and storing of data, it will still be possible in the future to gather data about your preferred target group, segment the corresponding audiences – such as by country or region or by interest – and reach out to them.

 

How does marketing, especially in B2B, benefit from the data-driven approach?

 

Performance such as click-through rate (CTR) is significantly greater for data-driven campaigns, as our analyses clearly demonstrate: Thanks to data support, our display campaigns for customers have an average CTR of 0.64% – compared to 0.09% with regular banner ads.

 

 

Let's suppose that I am a B2B marketer in a medium-sized IT company. Our solutions are very specific, and it is rare for customers to make a purchase the first time they visit our website. How do I manage to turn this one-time visitor into a customer?

 

This is where targeting comes in. It is a two-step process: first, the B2B website must be connected to a data management platform (DMP) so that we have one cookie per visitor. In a second step, the cookies are used to put together the preferred audience, which in turn are targeted on third-party websites such as news sites. This means that while the website visitor might not become a customer with the first click, precise targeting means that he will be at a later time.

 

Thank you very much for the interview, Mr Wasner!