Data-driven marketing is a wonderful strategy when the data is in good shape. But if your data is hard to access, difficult to use or untrustworthy, data-driven marketing becomes a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno – a living hell with a horrible surprise around every corner.
Having good data used to be considered the icing on the cake for marketing, but these days it’s way more important than that. Data is central to modern marketing; it’s the very core of brand building and product sales. With good data, you can communicate easily and inexpensively with customers, measure the success of marketing initiatives and continuously make adjustments off actionable insights that add power to your overall marketing efforts.
If you’re having challenges with data-driven marketing, including programmatic advertising, you’ll probably find it’s due to one or all of these problems:
1. Your data is stale
Real-time data is essential for many digital marketing tasks, just as it’s essential for best practice financial management of a company. When your marketers are working with fresh customer data, they can make informed decisions about campaigns and how to deliver personalised experiences.
A properly personalised customer experience is marketing’s ultimate goal. It ensures customers see, hear and read communications tailored to their needs and past interactions. To achieve this kind of data nirvana, data points need to be updated and refreshed as often as possible.
Analytics also require fresh data so that marketers can make smart decisions. When you understand how well a marketing initiative is working, you can confidently plan product supply and merchandising. You can also ensure your website is updated with relevant content that supports the current direction of customer curiosity.
2. Your data is hard to access
Putting a hold on a personalised newsletter or email campaign because you can’t access the data you need is a well-known problem in modern marketing life. Sometimes product launches are held up and opportunities lost, simply because marketers can’t quickly get their hands on the data they need.
This issue is sometimes described as a ‘data silo problem’, because it stems from data not being readily available right across your business. Data silos happen for lots of reasons: differing system permission issues, incompatible data types and multiple tool stacks, for example.
3. Your data is confuzzled
If sitting around scratching your head over data is the lowlight of your day, you’ll know what we mean by confuzzled. You’re puzzled and confused at the same time. Figuring out what data points mean is an exercise in time wastage. You might have a data interpretation expert in your ranks, but there will almost certainly be a wait involved. What you need is a clear data system that makes it easy for anyone to work out what data means. An easy-to-use, unambiguous data system will have a central repository and straightforward tagging framework for naming customer data.
4. Customers are getting grumpy
When data-driven communications go wrong, customers get grumpy. They receive messages that make no sense or look like spam; they receive newsletters and promotions without first opting in; they opt out, but still get communications from you; and they suspect you’re collecting data without their consent. When it gets really bad, they write emails to your CEO or go to the media.
Customer privacy is a topic you can’t brush over. Ten years ago, data collection by internet services and applications was seen as a good thing for marketers. Today, data collected without consent or used in a way that hasn’t been approved by the customer is collectively known as ‘bad data’. Using data collected by third parties is also a problem because it’s not likely to come with the required customer consents.
5. Downright dodgy data
Dodgy data is like fake news. It just isn’t telling the truth. Corrupted data or data pools that have stopped collecting new data feed into reports that can do serious damage to a business or organisation. As far as marketing’s concerned, untrustworthy data can result in lost revenue caused by bad customer experiences or poor targeting. The opportunities offered by data-driven marketing swerve off the road and crash when the data’s wrong.
Is n3 Hub the best way to fix bad data?
If bad data is plaguing your marketing efforts, moving to a next-generation customer data platform (CDP) could be the solution you need. In Australasia, n3 Hub CDP has proven its worth in many industry sectors.
To support superior digital customer engagement across all products and channels, n3 Hub makes it easy to locate, format and store all the real-time data you need. Seeing is believing, so request a demo of n3 Hub today.