Marketing organizations know that data is the key to unlocking marketing’s potential to drive maximum business value and create happy customers. Data-driven marketers are continually finding new ways to dissect and apply data in order to increase marketing performance. Yet, our ability to leverage data effectively in our marketing efforts is directly affected by the quality of the data fueling those efforts.
You’d think with all the industry emphasis on data-driven marketing that great effort would be placed on cultivating the quality of our databases. However, according to Sirius Decisions, 60% of companies have an overall data health of “unreliable”. The causes of this are numerous and the impact widespread.
Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to purify your data:
- Check out Scott Vaughan’s post on ridding data pollution from your pipeline. Scott shares an evaluation process to help you understand the impact that bad data has on your team, stakeholders and customers. You have to understand the problem, where it comes from and who it affects so that you can develop a plan to solve it.
- Implement a data governance software that will automatically validate your data before it goes into your marketing automation and sales systems. There are numerous data and lead validation solutions. The most efficient will validate your data in real-time, ensuring both accuracy and compliance against your pre-defined parameters, and either automatically inject the data into your designated endpoint (if validation is passed) or reject it and return to the original source. Using tech to validate your data will eliminate manual data processing, reduce effective data cost, and increase data velocity. You can learn more about Integrate’s data and lead validation software here.
- Understand how to make your data fluid. Data fluidity refers to data’s accuracy and cleanliness, velocity and flexibility, and usability for action or value. Ensuring clean and valid data is only the first stage to making data actionable. In order for marketing and sales to be able to leverage data to its full potential, Marketing Ops leaders need to take a full-spectrum approach to increasing data fluidity. If you or your Marketing Ops team is tackling the challenges of utilizing data to drive maximum business and customer value, get this whitepaper on Marketing Ops: The Need for Data Fluidity.
