Sean Crowley
As each day passes, there’s a ton of new data entering your marketing ecosystem: Web registrations, trade shows lists, pay per click campaigns, events…and the list of sources keeps getting longer. While all of this marketing data can be an asset to your programs, it can also be a liability. Inaccurate or outdated data can cause unnecessary bottlenecks and weaken marketing effectiveness, leading to missed sales opportunities and higher customer turnover.
The best case scenario is that the contact information within your database is pristine; however, as we all know, data is often riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and omissions. While collecting information is getting easier thanks to technology, the volume, variety and velocity of that data makes the management of that data increasingly difficult. After all, data has an established decay rate of about two to three percent per month.
As you reflect on Q1 2015 and gear up for Q2 execution, it’s time for a gut check. Ask yourself: did my marketing data work for or against me? If you answered the latter, then it’s time to you made marketing data management a priority. Proactive management ensures that your marketing records are complete, accurate and actionable so you can:
- Improve Segmentation: Complete business contact records allow you more options for segmenting and executing on vertical-specific marketing campaigns based on industry, or horizontal campaigns based on common challenges for companies of a similar size.
- Strengthen Content Personalization: In order to stay relevant to your buyers, you need to speak directly to their pain points, challenges and goals. Content personalization can grab the attention of your buyers, guide them in their buying journey and inspire them to take action. Without complete and accurate data on your prospects and customers, your risk communicating with generic or insincere messages and calls to action that fall far from the mark. Just as with segmentation, the more knowledge you have, the more relevant your content can be.
- Accelerate Demand Generation: Now more than ever, marketers are directly responsible for filling the sales pipeline. Poor data quality prohibits marketers from identifying qualified leads quickly and prohibits sales from having well-informed, relevant dialogues with prospects. Through data enrichment, records are filled with missing details or incremental information like company revenue, employee count, social profile links and website URLs, helping accelerate the sales pipeline and allowing for more relevant dialogues once a lead has been passed.
This is the year! Your marketing data has to take center stage if you are going to hit the goals just placed in front of you. Your campaigns are only as strong as your data—so prioritize data management and make your hard-earned marketing data work better for you. To learn more about how you can maximize the return on your marketing data, click here.
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