If you have marketing data strung across multiple databases, you’ll know just how much of a negative impact it can have on your marketing activities. After all, it’s tough to centralise all your data when pulling in numerous databases from various locations and sources throughout the business. Perhaps a good analogy here is the ‘clearance section’ of your local clothes retailer. There are some fantastic bargains to be found, but often the sections are so disjointed and unorganised that the chances of finding the quality items are slim. To put it in data terms, there will undoubtedly be sales within your data but without a centralised solution, it becomes very hard to find them.
It’s likely that tidying up your various databases isn’t a priority for your business, but perhaps it should be. A recent survey entitled ‘The Data Centric Organisation 2018’, carried out by the Winterberry Group, asked industry leaders across the media, IT, marketing and advertising sectors about the data within their businesses and its current state.
The survey found that the marketing and media sectors in particular are seriously sharp on centralising marketing data and are acutely aware of the hindrance disjointed databases can be.
A closer look at the findings show:
- Over 87% of those surveyed said data analytics is the competency their business needs to most advance their data usage
- Just under 10% would describe their business as ‘extremely’ data driven, with over 44% saying they would expect that level to be in place by 2019.
- 90% of the industry leaders surveyed said they already have or are planning to implement a strategy to support the use of audience data
- Only 1.35 of respondents said they were ‘extremely confident’ their businesses have the right skills, expertise and experience required to derive value from their data
What’s apparent here is there is obviously an understanding of the importance of a centralised database, but very few businesses have the skill set to implement it. The knock on effect for marketing departments who are reliant on data driven consumer patterns and trends is sizeable.
If you want to be reactive to customer behaviours, it’s paramount your data is centralised for your marketing department to capitalise on the intelligence your marketing campaigns uncover. In fact, it’s absolutely crucial you are able to rely on the accuracy of your findings if you aspire to be a data driven business. Inaccurate analytics and disjointed data sadly often hinder marketing departments that may otherwise be able to maximise ROI had these valuable insights been available.
In short, a centralised and well maintained marketing database will:
- Trim your marketing budgets as unsuccessful campaigns are easier to pinpoint allowing you to focus on what’s really working for you
- Deliver more accurate and insightful reports, as well as drastically reducing the time it takes to compile them.
- Allow you to better demonstrate ROI by having just one data source to report on, as opposed to pulling in reports from several databases and calculating the spend
At Herald Chase, we have long been advocates of a simple and tidy, data-centric solution and have assisted many of our clients in working towards that process. Whether that be with the aid of our MPS software to help validate the data, simple de-duplication processes or PAF verification, our data team have helped to streamline and centralise countless databases that have resulted in a slicker and more insightful operation. What’s more, with the impending GDPR regulations there has perhaps never been a greater need for your data to be scrutinised and centralised, allowing you to not only utilise your data for marketing purposes but also ensuring GDPR compliance is as easy as possible.
If you would like to talk to us about your marketing data or would simply like a free data health check, we’re on hand to help with all of your data requirements.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog piece, if you need any further info or have an enquiry , feel free to contact us on the office number: 0118 474 888.
