“One thing I can say is a true trend when we look across clients who are doing really well versus [those that are] struggling right now, is how well organized they were beforehand,” said Brad Geddes, co-founder of AdAlysis, during the PPC for B2B session of Live with Search Engine Land, saying, “Companies who had good CRM systems that talked to their stuff [and] their data flowed well, are managing this much better than people who are cobbling together systems with everyone now distributed.”
According to Geddes, for businesses that have worse data governance, the opposite is also true. Those companies could have witnessed changes to their bottom lines or the amount of lead forms that have been submitted, but struggle to determine what they have to change in order to turn those figures around since they don’t have much data on customer behavior. Not only that, business with poor data management and organizational practices might end up finding themselves focusing on basic metrics, so if and when they see a decline in conversion rates, they will probably reduce or halt marketing spend than companies with better insights.
“The biggest difference is those that had great data could easily see the trends in how users were buying, changing shopping (or lead) habits, changes to the products being sold, and so forth,” Geddes said, saying that businesses that had this information readily available could dig into the trends, allowing them to make better and more efficient strategic decisions.
“Those with good insights were more likely to change their marketing messages, cut brand spend, increase spend in other areas, and looked at it more as a marketing challenge that needed to be solved than something to run away from and just stop spending,” he said Geddes caveated this saying that there are exceptions, such as businesses in highly impacted sectors like travel and leisure.