Improve Results with a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Dun & Bradstreet, in collaboration with B2B Marketing, have produced a report, explaining why it’s more vital than ever to clean up your marketing data. Marketers know the cost of bad data. Whether it comes in the form of fines from regulatory bodies or wasted time, there’s never been a more compelling case to clean up your act. This report shows how much time, money and effort marketers waste on bad lead data. Our report outlines the business case for new marketing technology, external consultancy, or simply more training and resources, all in order to clean up your data. The results are a better understanding of your clients, and therefore more successful marketing. All marketing efforts, whether that’s to increase leads, tackle GDPR or experiment with account-based marketing, depend on it.
The Third Age of Data Brings New Marketing Strategies
We now live in the third age of data – and as each of the last three decades have passed, the need for immaculate prospect information has increased exponentially. The 1990s was the first age of data and the era of direct mail. Marketers were charged with delivering successful direct mail campaigns that relied on clean, correct firmographic data. But things, by contrast, were simple. Throughout the noughties, the digital revolution was in full throttle and a surge of data came with it. While the need for clean data remained, the volume of it made for an increasingly tough challenge. The world of marketing was getting more complex, yet the opportunities for success were growing exponentially. In this third age of data, today’s marketers are caught between the expectations for highly personalized messages that cut above the noise of others and the need to protect the privacy of individuals. Marketing data must be precise, personal, up-to-date – but above all treated with respect and privacy. Extensive and accurate information is now integral to every aspect of marketing. Bad data means bad marketing.
The 8 Cs of Clean Marketing Data
We have compiled a list of the 8 Cs of clean marketing data, along with a report and webinar created in collaboration with B2B Marketing, containing solid tips for achieving data quality. Here are eight simple rules to help you on the path to clean data.
1. Calculate the business case for good data. Collate statistics around time spent uploading new records and using your CRM system. Alternatively, have a third party review your position with a value calculation.
2. Communicate between marketing and the head office, and the technical team. Agree on who will take ownership of the project.
3. Collaborate between different teams, gaining information from the back office and sales around the best way to ensure data is clean before and after it enters a CRM system.
4. Clarify roles and set KPIs for each team, communicating what their responsibilities are when it comes to data.
5. Create clear rules around who should load a record within the CRM system and when it should be entered and removed, by determining when it’s sales qualified.
6. Consistency is key. Make sure every route into the CRM system has consistent fields and is entered correctly; whether that’s through autofill, manually entered by internal staff, or by the customers themselves using a web contact form.
7. Centralise your data without any of the heavy lifting, make sure you have a unique identifier for every parent company and record so that duplicates can be spotted and removed.
8. Commit money to training, consultancy, and implementing knowledge to work with your systems, not on new pieces of tech you won’t get value out of if you don’t understand its full capabilities.
How Good Data Enhances Marketing Strategies
Good data provides not only a more efficient, streamlined way of working, but also a better understanding of who your customers are and how they behave.
Only if you have clean data can you add insight and have confidence about where to place effort. Having ‘one source of truth’ is paramount to optimising your marketing.
Undoubtedly, working with clean data saves resources. It helps the sales team know which record to use, and helps build a complete customer profile, solving problems around retention. If you know which customers are leaking from your sales pipeline you can begin to understand why, and what you can do to stop it
Top 5 Reasons to Clean Up Your Data, Now
1. Saves time, money, and resources.
2. Gives a 360˚ view of clients, keeping track of what they’re spending and predicting purchase behaviour.
3. Justifies martech investment by quantifying data and the impact it has on your business.
4. Segments and profiles your customers for targeted marketing.
5. Spots correlations a human wouldn’t.
Defining the Business Case for Clean Data
The board is more likely to give you budget for a new product, but what about optimising your data? Here’s what you’ll need to demonstrate the business benefit of a clean-up.
How to understand your current position:
Defining the business case for clean data Collate stats on data entry, such as how many records you are loading each quarter.
Make sure you know the different routes by which data enters the system, and how this can be simplified.
Calculate how much time sales and marketing are spending loading records onto the CRM system.
Calculate how much other people in the company are using it.
Want to hear more?
Watch our webinar and download the report in collaboration with B2B Marketing, where we explore why data quality is now more important than ever.