Last updated on September 28th, 2020 at 08:23 pm
Quality data is the backbone of a strong B2B marketing campaign. But most people struggle to take in data via boring spreadsheets, charts, and texts. About 65 percent of people are visual learners, which is why data visualizations are such an important part of marketing campaigns. Graphs featuring bright colors, pie charts, timelines, and other visualizations catch the eye and help audiences wrap their heads around big numbers.
And the numbers often are very big. We’re generating more data at this point in history than ever before, and at astounding rates. Every day, web users are creating 2,500,000 terabytes of data — and just in the past few years, people have created 90 percent of the data ever created by mankind throughout history. Data visualization tools can make layers of data easier to digest and understand, and they can help you more accurately measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
Tell Stories
A successful marketing campaign piques customer interest by telling a story, and B2B marketing campaigns are no different. The stories you’ll tell might rely more heavily on data and logic, but they nevertheless play an important role in persuading your clients to trust your services.
Good data visualization tools can help you tell a story of how things change over time, like Google’s Music Timeline. They can help you outline a problem and illustrate its solution. Putting your data in a visual format will help you maximize its persuasive potential, including choosing the precise data sets you need to illustrate your call to action and walk your audience through the numbers that backup your claims.
Find Patterns
You need to plan your marketing campaigns to maximize the chances that your target customers will take action. Data visualizations can help you synchronize your campaigns with your clients’ needs. Numbers on their own are boring and, as previously noted, difficult to understand in terms of their significance to your customers’ problem. But colorful charts can make important implications and patterns clear at a glance.
Just take a look at this visualization of historic stock market returns from The New York Times — in a single glance, you can see how stock market returns over the past century have fallen and risen with almost startling precision. The graph parses the data elegantly, imparting vital information about stock market returns and economic cycles over the past 100 years, and there’s nary a big number to be reckoned with. This is very complex information, but with the help of a well-constructed data visualization, it’s easy to take in and understand.
Make Connections
Data visualization tools can help you draw connections between metrics like web traffic, conversion score, and the number of conversions. You can use these tools to bring together metrics drawn 
from different channels, and make sense of them in new ways. Visualizations help you connect data to what’s going on in the real world — the way a map, for example, connects data to physical geography.
Assess the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaigns
Even more so than in B2C marketing, you need to have a clear picture of how your B2B campaigns are performing, because these campaigns tend to be so much more expensive than B2C campaigns. You’re not going to get that clear picture from staring at a stack of spreadsheets. You’ll get it from data visualization tools that help you see the connections between ad campaign conversion rates, social media activity, and sales.
At a mere glance, you’ll be able to see which advertising channels are performing well and which ones are not. You’ll be able to identify your best customers and influencers, so you can make decisions about brand ambassadorship. And you’ll be able to identify which times of the day, month, week, or year saw the highest conversion rates. This information can help you make valuable decisions to increase your advertising return on investment (ROI).
Data visualization tools are immensely powerful for making sense of data. Even intricately layered and complex data pools become clear when the right data visualization tools are used to examine and analyze them. When your company harnesses the power of data visualizations, your B2B marketing campaigns will become more effective than you ever could have dreamed.
