Data marketing in the post-covid era: transformation of B2B businesses

In a context of transformation, what are the new issues to be taken into account when developing a B2B data marketing strategy? An overview with the Data Marketing Services team ofEllisphere, the French leader in business information.

Data marketing, the number one priority in the digital transformation of B2B companies

Partly responsible for this figure is the health crisis that has accelerated the digital transformation of our society and the resulting changes. However, during the containment, if consumers have never spent so much time online, companies have seen their prospecting actions, and therefore their growth, come to a halt.

A situation that has caused a rebound in activity since the end of the containment in June 2020, explains Romain Boldi, data marketing market manager at Ellisphere: "As soon as the economy recovered at the end of the first containment, we saw a large number of new requests related to prospecting in order to be able to anticipate the year 2021 and return to growth; growth that now comes through data marketing. The containment has really made companies, which previously might have felt little concerned by data marketing and its tools, aware that the subject is no longer an option today if you want to sustain your business. Today, we can see that data marketing is one of the top priorities of companies, regardless of their size.

To meet this high demand, companies specializing in data marketing, such as Ellisphere, were very much in demand: "We had to be very reactive during this period to help our customers implement the data marketing tools we offer, but also to support them in activating their prospecting campaigns, a component that is entirely part of our core business .

Choosing a solution is a major challenge for companies

While the demand for data marketing solutions has exploded in recent months, the supply has followed suit. A boom that is not necessarily favorable for the decision-making of companies, which can quickly find themselves drowned among the multitude of solutions available, in an activity that they do not always master: "This awareness is only the first step in the digitalization process. Companies then go on the internet to look for tools available to collect and then exploit data. And there, in general, everyone is lost in front of the multitude of possibilities. People rush to install tools without having thought about their strategic needs, but also their structural needs, especially in terms of foundation, database, and interconnection of the ecosystem", says Romain Boldi.

Emailing tools, management CRM, web monitoring, native, open source or historical tools... What to choose and how to proceed? For the data marketing market manager, the strategy to adopt is simple: be accompanied by a company that, in addition to offering effective tools and assisting its customers in their installation, will be able to create coherence between the solutions so that they interconnect for optimal use.

• Article published on the E-marketing.fr website