Published on the 01/08/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Legacy data siloes and multiple front-ends hamper business-to-business marketers…
A recently released Frost & Sullivan whitepaper suggests that B2B marketers in particular suffer from the challenge of siloed data. Where consumer marketers face challenges when it comes to getting a view of the customer, Frost & Sullivan claims that the problem is compounded for B2B marketing; “Within many B2B focused companies it is common to find multiple technology platforms for supporting different functions, such as content marketing, web and mobile analytics, social marketing, CRM and marketing automation platforms.”
On top of that, teams focused on lead generation, lead scoring, display advertising, outbound marketing and inbound marketing establish their own data siloes to manage the process, creating an ever more fractured picture of the customer or prospect.
Frost & Sullivan suggests that data management platforms, able to corral information from multiple sources in a single logical location, are perhaps the best way for business-to-business marketers to get a clearer picture of their customers and prospects.
According to analyst IDC, the main players in the data management platform space include Adobe, IgnitionOne, Google, Oracle and Wunderman. Local ANZ market forecasts are not available, but IDC has predicted US demand will be strong – rising 43 per cent a year until 2021.
Cameron Strachan, principal solutions consultant for Oracle Marketing Cloud in APAC, said that where companies outsourced some or all of their B2B marketing, using media agencies or social agencies, the challenge of getting a clear view of all the marketing data was particularly acute. But without a better approach there would be a continued decline on the return on investment in marketing.
“Media agencies have done a great job harnessing digital. But advancement tends to have been in silos,”
said Strachan.
He said that cloud based data management platforms allowed all the relevant data to be brought together where it could be made available to different marketing teams, overcoming the silo problem.
However he noted that enterprise CIOs were rarely involved, with marketing leaders generally responsible for selecting and using the marketing platforms. He acknowledged that “There is always a risk with a new technology that it becomes a new silo,” and that it was a “tough conundrum for customers.”
