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Data-analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, sales analytics software, actionable insights, natural language processing, machine learning… sound familiar?

Analytics are big business in 2016 with keywords such as these placing as top of mind challenges for digital content marketers and sellers.

With the year in full swing we’ve decided to lay out the current state of and challenges within data analytics for businesses.

 The Availability of Data is Growing

Author Mitch Joel says, “when businesses and professionals hear words like ‘data’, ‘analytics’, and ‘loyalty programs’ their eyes tend to glaze over. Then again, there is nothing sexier about a hyper-loyal customer, and how they spread the good will of a brand” (Source: Chase, M. 2016).

Digital content and other data-rich touch-points are generating data at a greater velocity, volume, and variety than before.

• 90% of the worlds data was created in just the last 2 years alone; and
• Job demand within data & analytics has grown to 5 million positions annually (Source: Chase, M. 2016).

But Few are Using Data Effectively

Data is an enabler of insights, not an answer within itself (Source: Chase, M. 2016). Gathering a large volume of data about buyers is fine, but the data must be woven into persuasive stories that compel the target audience of that data.

• Only 30% of marketing projects run by B2B companies leveraged marketing analytics (Source: Marketstrong, 2015).
• 17% of marketers stated they used NO content effectiveness measurements (Source: DemandMetric, 2014).
• 48% state they only use basic levels of digital content measurement (Source: Hubspot, 2014).

With at Least Half of all Businesses Only Using Retrospective Insights

Updating a CRM with anecdotal insights and focusing on limited metrics like conversions and visits create time consuming, limited, and retrospective insights.

Meanwhile, at least 51% of businesses use exactly these kinds of data points.

(Image Source: Forrester, 2016)

And even with these numbers, only 38% of marketing automation users applied progressive profiling to their activities (Source: Wishpond, 2015).

NOTE: Progressive Profiling is the steady accumulation of data and insights over time to an account/profile that is being tracked, such as one within CRM.

Data challenges are one of four major hurdles facing businesses in 2016. Download our FREE ebook to learn about the need-to-know issues to mitigate this year.

Data Challenges are Common Struggles within Business

The main problem cited by the greatest proportion of businesses:

• Ensuring data quality and creating actionable insights from the data; and
• Managing data from a variety of sources.

47% of businesses cited both of these challenges (Forrester, 2016).

Data is exactly the reason why CRM-user adoption numbers are crashing below 50%. With so much data creation, the inputs and outputs have to be contextually relevant and entirely automated, otherwise they cease being a tool for enablement and become an admin detour that wastes time.

Other Challenges:

• Providing real time insights – 39%
• Managing the velocity of data – 36%
• Standardizing the metrics – 35%
• Connecting accounts we have data on to the organizations they represent – 34%.

The sales stack technology industry continues to grow as businesses struggle to manage these challenges, yet there’s a reason we found you only need 5 sales rep software solutions to maximize your output and eliminate all of these challenges.

Most Businesses are Racing into Data to Address New Buyer Challenges

Most (78%) businesses now recognize that the buyer decision journey is non-linear as buyers now have a 3 to 1 preference for going online instead of seeing a sales rep directly (Source: Forrester, 2016).

(Image Source: Forrester, 2016)

Businesses want to capture a recent explosion of unstructured data that can be buried away in emails, reports, contracts, surveys, social media, blogs, etc. (Source: My Customer, 2015).

• 90% of businesses have stated that analytics is on their roadmap for 2016 (Source: Forrester, 2016);
• 7% of a brand’s current marketing budget is spent on analytics, this is expected to increase to 11.1% over the next 3 years (Source: Salespredict, 2015).

But Poor Planning is Yielding Little from Data Investments

Digital content marketing is the go-to strategy for the new buyer decision journey, and data enables this strategy to be optimized over time.

• 86% of B2B marketers are using digital content marketing; and
• 70% are creating even more content than they did one year ago (Source: Marketstrong, 2015).

But as we’ve seen above, 51% are using retrospective insights, and only a minority consider their use of analytics to be effective. The result is digital content marketing that is ineffective and unused:

• 60-70% of marketing content goes unused by a business; and
• A recent study by Corporate Visions suggests a higher number, at 90% of content being unused (Source: My Customer, 2015).

Instead we’re seeing a Continuous One-Way flow of Data and Operations

• Marketing teams are creating content based on their siloed awareness and research;
• Many marketers only apply early-funnel consumption awareness from marketing automation;
• Marketing teams are missing the opportunity for integrated marketing communications that actually include the sales team;
• There is no awareness into content consumption by sellers, or whether digital content was being used at all;
• The outcome of digital content used in the sales cycle is unknown, and CRM systems are poorly updated;
• Sales performance management is anecdotal and poorly informed; and
• Sales reps are creating their own digital content.

These are challenges we’re all too familiar with at Skura. If you struggle with the volume, velocity, and variety of data, and need a tool that helps coordinate your digital content sales and marketing communications, request a demo and let us show you how simple data-awareness can be.

How Does Data Turn the Tables?

In our next post we’ll delve into how data can change digital sales and marketing for any business. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive a notification upon release. A hyperlink to that post can be found here when released.

Let’s take a quick look at how predictive analytics change the game for business.

(Image Source: Forrester, 2016)

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