Data is like oxygen for go-to-market teams. It’s a vital necessity for attracting, nurturing, and converting leads into customers, and not having it can cost your business big time. Research estimates a total of $142B in revenue was lost last year due to marketers inadvertently optimizing campaigns for fake audiences, stemming from poor data.
While multiple causes are at the root of bad decisions driven by bad data, one of most common – and most addressable – is an incomplete picture of your customer. Efficient and effective customer acquisition requires fishing in the right spot with the right lures. If you don’t truly understand who you’re fishing for, how can you expect to catch them?
In the year ahead, gathering data directly from your customers at all stages of the journey – not just at the top of the funnel – will be the key to unlocking growth.
The personalization imperative
Budgets are beginning to open up as the business landscape starts to find equilibrium following a volatile few years. That said, the sour aftertaste of budget cuts, layoffs, and uncertainty still lingers. Spend scrutiny is high, and buyer expectations are even higher. If you can’t communicate ROI in half a second, your prospects will slip away.
What this means for revenue teams is that in order to attract and keep eyes, you need to speak your customers’ language and transfix them with solutions uniquely tailored to them. Doing this successfully requires painting a complete picture of your customer, which can only be achieved through data. This isn’t your average personalization we’re talking about – this is the future of marketing and sales.
Think about it like this: in the dystopian film “Blade Runner,” interactive digital billboards change to appeal to different people walking by and even come to life to “talk” about each passerby’s needs. While we’re not quite at the point of interacting with billboards yet, the idea is the same. The age of generic is over – revenue teams must build personalized journeys where every touchpoint demonstrates your depth of understanding.
An untapped data goldmine
Nine out of ten teams are gathering information about their customers in various ways. You can obtain it from your own platforms, like your website. You can aggregate it by external sources. And you can collect it directly from customers who proactively and willingly provide their information – this type of data is called zero-party data, and for many companies it can be an untapped goldmine.
Marketing teams solicit information from customers at common touch points – usually at the very top of the funnel, or the very end – like generating leads through a “contact us” form or sending a churned customer a feedback survey. Now imagine if you took a more robust approach, utilizing data collection at each part of the funnel instead of a singular point in time.
By meeting customers where they are in their journey, with different options that get them to engage, you can gather deeper data – and the more data you have, the more you can enrich, the more targeted you can be, and the better you can become with acquisition. This type of sharp marketing is especially critical in a time when efficiency and cost effectiveness are critical. Having a steady stream of data directly from the source enables you to reach key insights, pivot, and adapt strategies almost in real-time – much faster than interpreting massive amounts of conversion rate data and extrapolating what it means.
Collecting data from your customers throughout the funnel has a positive ripple effect beyond marketing. As many companies push toward product-led growth, serving personalized marketing content made possible through great data can route customers through a complete funnel, without needing to engage a salesperson at all. Or even if your sales team is involved, they’ll have more information about the customer to follow up in a personalized way. Not only can this save your company unneeded go-to-market investments, but it also provides a better customer experience.
The art and science of data collection
We know that gathering data from your customers throughout the funnel is the missing piece in your data puzzle. Now the question becomes how to do it. There’s no wrong or right way to go about some things – like art. But zero-party data collection is both art and science, requiring a combination of strategic know-how and best practice implementation along with creativity and customer empathy.
Zero-party data collection encompasses various engaging methods beyond traditional form-filling. Instead of mundane forms, businesses now have the opportunity to captivate their audience through innovative means. For instance, introducing interactive elements such as entertaining quizzes or immersive video surveys can provide a more enjoyable and informative way for customers to share their preferences. Additionally, leveraging recent advancements in AI technology allows for a significant leap in personalization. AI-powered tools empower businesses to analyze and interpret zero-party data more effectively, enabling the creation of highly tailored experiences.
When done correctly, the data collection process can actually be a trust-building moment between your business and your customers. By inviting customers to participate in sharing their preferences, needs, and opinions, you’re not only collecting valuable insights but also demonstrating a genuine commitment to understanding and serving them better. It becomes a reciprocal exchange: as customers contribute, they actively participate in tailoring solutions. This both fosters a sense of ownership and also solidifies the idea that your business values their contributions, ultimately strengthening the trust they have in your brand’s dedication to meeting their needs.
Mine insights to win (and keep) customers
Gathering zero-party data at multiple funnel stages makes your entire go-to-market team more effective. When you know exactly who your customer is, you can reach them that much better, which benefits your business and customers alike.
Too often we assume or tell our customers what our product use case is – but it should be the other way around. By reversing that and listening, we can then echo back what we hear. Your customers know best what they need, so why not let them tell you?
