Are your marketing programs failing due to poor data?

December 12, 2016 sojournadmin

By Dan Vawter

It never ceases to amaze me how many marketing organizations are reluctant to tackle that obvious problem – contact data accuracy.

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Somehow, it slips off the agenda as more exciting projects come to the fore. The lack of a formal approach simply means the data continues to deteriorate and less value is available. Campaign performance fails to meet expectations and time and effort is spent debating the merits of creative and A/B testing subject lines and CTAs.

Data generally is becoming sexier. Big data, analytics and data visualization are rapidly becoming the new rock stars of organizations as the digital enterprise takes hold. Yet, it’s the housekeeping for basic contact data that is choking marketing performance, according to SiriusDecisions,

‘10-25% of B2B marketing data contains critical errors.’*

In an era of highly personalized account-based marketing this can seriously degrade your customers brand experience.

There is a simple question to ask that will help you prioritize data and realize the true value it can deliver.

“If I spend my marketing budget on content creation and do nothing with regard to data quality – to what degree do I improve demand generation?”

SiriusDecisions’ research shows that companies that improve their data accuracy from 75% to 90% can realize as much as 70% more revenue.

We expect this to be true for you too – so it seems foolhardy not to commit to a clean data plan.

The first step to sorting out your data is to collect a series of comprehensive benchmarks. Understanding the current state of your data is essential to move forward. Diving straight into data cleaning could waste valuable effort and budget. It’s important to know what to benchmark from the outset. Sojourn Solutions has identified four criteria most relevant for B2B marketing organizations:

1.Data completeness – Is there enough complete data to target someone with appropriate personalization and messaging that matches a target persona?
2.Data Accuracy – fields with garbage data will skew segments. For example, if a segment is selected on a specific field such as job function – but data is blank or contains the wrong data, then you will only be able to target a percentage of that segment.
3.Data timeliness – How old is your data? When was the last time someone engaged with your content? Data quality erodes fast; people change roles and /or change companies on average every two years.
4.Account Penetration – If you are focused on an account based marketing strategy then matching data to personas and understanding the gaps is essential to ensure you are penetrating accounts across appropriate stakeholders and decision-makers.

 

This may all seem like common sense but a surprising number of organizations suffer from poor marketing data.

You can read more about the benchmarking process in our document: ‘How to benchmark your B2B Marketing Database’.

To be effective, the commitment to clean data has to be long term. We recommend a quarterly program to ensure you maintain consistent and accurate data as part of your overall marketing strategy. The evidence is clear, clean data will improve campaign performance and drive better ROI.

Okay, enough talk, let’s do something about that elephant. You want to know where you are with data, and where you need to go. It’s time to engage Sojourn for an assessment and concrete recommendations and actions. Here is what we will do:

Sojourn Data Assessment & Data Quality Roadmap

1.Connect your Eloqua and CRM data
Before extracting data for analysis, this is an important step. Eloqua has all of the relevant Contact data, of course, but your CRM platform is where key Contacts are connected to Opportunities. We want to use the Contacts that are connected to Won Opportunities. Analysis of these Contacts will lead to key persona intelligence.
2.Evaluate data completeness and accuracy
See the above descriptions. If a significant portion of your Contacts have empty or garbage-filled fields, then our analysis will in return not be complete or accurate.
3.Append, clean, and enrich your data for analysis
Based on the accuracy and completeness of data fields, we will most likely have to turn useless Contacts into Contacts full of useful information. We will be drawing out a sample set of data and including the appending, cleaning and enriching in our service.
4. Assess demographic and firmographic attributes of buyers
Now that we have a set of key Contacts, we can now confidently state facts about the personas that should matter to you and your success. We will let you know what types of Contacts have been key to marketing efforts and to your sales reps closing deals. You will have that actionable intelligence you need to target the right Contacts at the right time.
5. Assess demographic and firmographic attributes of buyers
Further analysis will produce recommendations on how to run better Campaigns and how to create an effective Scoring Engine. You can use these findings to send the right message at the right time to the right Contacts. And you can create high-quality Leads that will make you a hero with the sales team.
6. Assess demographic and firmographic attributes of buyers

 

This is all a process and a journey – not a one-time exercise. Our powerful recommendations and executable roadmap will be a document to follow every quarter and every year. With these you will see continuing Campaign performance improvement enabled by a well-optimized marketing automation machine.

Sojourn offers our Data Assessment and Optimization service for only $8000.

If we put you well on the way to that 75 – 90% data quality improvement, to which Sirius refers above, you could very well see a 70% boost in revenue. So how does that ROI sound to you?

Start the journey here today!

*SiriusDecisions

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