In today’s day and age, there is so much content available – written content, video content, marketing content and so forth for the end user. Drawing parallels with marketers, it becomes clear that they have a mounting pile of “data”. Where does all the data come from? CRMs, transaction data, customer data and other databases to name a few.
Does your data provide you with adequate insight to answer all your questions related to marketing? Well, one easy way to identify an issue is when you know there’s an element in your equation that just doesn’t add up. Too much data, too many graphs with complicated text is often hard to comprehend. As advertisers you need to be able to understand the data you have at hand in a quick and effortless manner! You’d then be able to predict the consumer needs of your target audiences.
Data analyses equip marketing and sales to construct their respective plans that are in line with the organization’s goal. If you are an advertiser, here are a few pointers to help you mediate and use your data more efficiently:
- Profile data: The practice of data profiling helps you comprehend the first-party, second-party, and third-party data; wherein, you identify the missing links and incorrect entries listed within the data set. This promises quality data collection while assuring its relevance to your target audience.
- Standardize: Standardizing data across channels enables you to establish an intelligent customer database. For marketers in an organization to know what to measure and how to measure it, it is important to set standards. Start with the external sources or with the internal data your currently own.
- Maintain consistency – Data can be interpreted differently by people and even computer systems, for example, if an individual were to list his employer as Tata, when filling out a form to download a white paper, the system might not recognize it since it is only familiar with TCS. Therefore, it is important to have standards set and to record the data in a manner, that is recognized universally. One such example is how dates need to be recorded, whether in the format of dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy.
- Treat data silos: The information from the various regional offices, departments and different communication channels of an organization contribute to growing amounts of data. Irrelevance or inconsistency in data, can lead to miscommunication or confusion even within the organization. It is therefore vital that you have processes, guidelines and technologies in place to make sure that the branches, and teams sharing data work effectively together.
What if one software could collect, organize, administer, analyze, conduct data quality checks and recognize the trends within the acquired consumer database? It is about time that marketers’ jobs are made a little bit easier by breaking information silos and giving them a leg up with clarity and easy access to the right resource. The result will mean more time for you to get the creativity flowing to boost your brand’s presence.
