Is your data in need of a little love and attention? Does it require more preparation before it is plugged into a marketing campaign? If you chuck high volumes of bad data, such as incomplete contact information, into your campaign, it’s likely you’ll get bad results. Similar to a relationship, you only get out what you put in.
Data accuracy has always been a key element of any marketing campaign, and as software has evolved, it has become increasingly crucial. Indeed, recent research from enterprise technology media, data, and services company, IDG, polling marketing, sales and research personnel in 300 US enterprise organisations, indicates that poor data quality is one of the top three concerns of the modern day marketer and that accuracy is the “top priority” among two-thirds of marketing professionals.
As the capability of analytics has increased, it has become still more important to prepare the data fully and accurately. Yet obtaining accurate data capable of fuelling a company’s marketing efforts is often a difficult, time-consuming and intractable challenge.
Philip Howard, research director at Bloor Research says:
“Extracting value from data has historically involved a lot of time and effort – especially when it is disparate and from multiple sources. And far too much of that time and effort has been spent just getting the data ready to be analysed rather than in the analysis process itself.”
Democratising data
Historically, the task of data preparation has too often fallen to overburdened IT teams that can’t keep up with the growing data demands of the business, and data analysts who are all too frequently spending more time wrangling with data than they are supplying insights. Fortunately, with the advent of the latest open source self-service applications, this is now all changing.
The ability to explore, cleanse, enrich and combine data in minutes instead of hours allows line of business users to apply their own unique domain expertise and work directly with the data that’s relevant to their business objectives. And by simplifying the whole process, this kind of capability represents another step towards the democratisation of data analysis and a further step away from using traditional spreadsheets. Data analysis was a highly specialised task, requiring the involvement of expert and very expensive data analysts.
These latest advancements help to empower marketers - even those with no IT background - to do it themselves quickly and easily, use the results to track customer behaviour and preferences, and find out more about drivers of customer loyalty and optimal marketing spend, in order to deliver fast, precisely targeted and cost-effective marketing campaigns.
It’s all about ease of use: even without an IT skillset, users can quickly get data in the desired format while avoiding having to create complicated formulae, write code or complete the same tasks over and over again.
Keeping marketers happy
That’s great news of course to any marketer who has experienced the all too familiar scenario of having just returned to the office from a major industry tradeshow exhausted, completely backlogged on email and other projects and yet with reams of new leads that need to be validated and entered into the customer relationship management (CRM) system that day.
The ability to use the latest technology to streamline the whole process and reduce the time taken from hours to minutes will help you wrest back time from the laborious process of cleaning and crunching data and allow them to spend it instead on analysing the overall ROI of an event, for example.
Love and attention
Once again, it’s all about showing your data the love and attention it deserves. In the old world, when presented a new database of prospects, marketers would typically have had to spend hours checking accuracy, ensuring the information is complete across all fields and avoiding duplication.
Today, the ability of the latest self-service technology to help you access, cleanse and prepare the data quickly, allows you to spend more time on the high-value task of analytics. And that’s critically important because analytics can be the driver of differentiation for any marketing department and it is increasingly valued as such.
Research published by digital marketing consultancy, Smart Insights reveals that big data (including market and customer insight and predictive analytics) is seen as second only to content marketing in a poll of digital marketing activities likely to have the greatest commercial impact in 2016.
Marketing departments increasingly value their data and appreciate the importance of using it to deliver value to the business. And the great news for marketers is you can now engineer your data to be your most prized possession, and employ a simple process such as data preparation to allow marketing spend to become significantly more precise in the roll-out and analysis of campaigns. What's not to love about that?
by Charlotte Cornavin, senior director field marketing, Talend
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus