A report released from Dun & Bradstreet has shone a light on the increasing prevalence of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) among B2B businesses, and the importance of technologies and data in their marketing and advertising stack.

The global 2019 Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising Outlook report of B2B marketers and their agencies shows that 71% consider ABM important to their organisation’s marketing efforts; 4 in 10 companies believe ABM to be at least “very important”. Currently, 37% of B2B marketers are already doing ABM in their company with a further 22% planning to next year.

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Yet marketers identified clear barriers to succeeding with ABM. The biggest challenge is an unclear ABM strategy (35%), followed by a lack of time/resources (31%) and a lack of understanding about ABM (29%).

“As more B2B organisations turn to ABM to better address complex customer journeys and processes, they need a data strategy that reflects this shift,” commented Anudit Vikram, SVP of Audience Solutions for Dun & Bradstreet. “Having a solid data foundation connected across sales and marketing and a complete 360 degree view of the customer is imperative to executing ABM effectively and maximising its potential.”

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The survey also identified advertising and marketing tactics B2B marketers use to drive targeting, insights and personalisation; the top tactic marketers are currently using is creating actionable data-driven insights (56%). Looking further into the future, marketers are looking to implement predictive analytics over any other technology in the next 12-24 months (49%).

Like with ABM, there are clearly obstacles to overcome in succeeding with data-driven marketing. The biggest obstacles for marketers were siloed/inaccessible customer data (32%) and integration of marketing and sales platforms (32%). Marketers then cited incomplete customer data (30%) and lack of data expertise (30%) as the next biggest challenges.

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