Mastering marketing data management for better campaigns and higher ROI

Marketing data is the lifeblood of most modern businesses. It offers insights into who your customers are and what they want. It empowers you to design and deploy effective and efficient campaigns. It informs your messaging. In no uncertain terms, it powers your ability to bring in revenue. 

It should be no surprise, then, that most modern businesses are generating and collecting massive amounts of data. 

While that’s a good thing, knowing how to manage this data can be a challenge. And when data isn’t managed properly, it can cause that data to become less useful. That’s because the more data you store, the harder it is to see what data you have and to extract value from it. 

Poor data management is such a problem that a recent study shows that marketers waste 21 cents of every media dollar because of poor-quality data.

In short, proper marketing data management processes aren’t a nice-to-have: They’re a necessity. 

Below, we look at what marketing data management is and how it works. We also walk through some challenges and best practices associated with data management and answer other commonly asked questions.

What is marketing data management?

Marketing data management refers to the processes a business deploys to gather, organize, store, and secure its marketing data so that it can easily analyze the information and extract meaningful insights from it. 

In other words, proper marketing data management gives organizations control over their data, which often lives in various sources and platforms across many departments. These siloes make it difficult to gain complete visibility of all of an organization’s data. 

Proper data management unifies organizational data for better data integrity, accuracy, availability, accessibility, and security. Combining data from several sources creates a single source of truth that allows your company to make more complete customer profiles and add value to the products and services you provide.

Marketing data vs. customer data

Customer data refers to any information that a business collects directly about an individual customer or user. This includes zero-party data that a customer shares directly with your business, such as their name, contact information, location, date of birth, and interests. 

It also includes first-party data that you collect from a user as they interact with your website or business, such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, page and product views, and more. Businesses use customer data to improve the customer experience and provide more tailored and personalized marketing.

Marketing data, on the other hand, is a broader bucket of information that can be used to improve your marketing strategies. This includes customer data (above), as well as market research, competitor intelligence and marketing metrics. 

Marketing data helps you understand who customers are and evaluate the effectiveness of your current marketing strategies to create more effective campaigns and optimize your processes.

Marketing data management challenges

The pace of today’s businesses and the high volumes of data they generate make data management an ever-increasing challenge. Let’s look at some of the top challenges organizations face with data management.

Complying with changing data requirements

If your business collects and stores data about your customers, it’s essential that you comply with the relevant data privacy and protection laws and regulations that apply to you. Failure to do so can result in significant fines and penalties, legal battles, regulatory action, and damaged customer trust.

What’s worse, these laws are complex, ever-changing, and lack any real standardization. Examples include the GDPR in Europe, and both the CCPA and CPRA in California and the US.

Difficulty accessing and activating data

In many organizations, data is siloed — living in different systems such as your CRM, website management system, POS, accounting system, behavioral tracking tools, and more. Often, these systems are only accessible to different members of your team. 

That means it’s harder to know what data you have, where it’s stored, and how you can use it. It also increases the time it takes for users to get the information they need and makes it more difficult to benefit from real-time insights into your target audience.

Marketing data management best practices

Implementing data management best practices can reduce the risk of dirty data and ensure that your data remains at its highest quality. Consider the following data management best practices.

1. Integrate your data

As mentioned, one of the major challenges of marketing data management is siloed data. Customers interact with your business across several touch points. Data can be used more effectively if it is aggregated from across all sources so that it can be analyzed together. This allows you to see the complete customer journey to better identify patterns and contexts. 

2. Prioritize data security

When collecting customer data, it’s important to adhere to the laws and regulations related to data security and customer privacy. Make sure everyone involved understands these requirements to ensure your data management system remains compliant.

3. Focus on quality data

Be conscious of the data you are collecting. Good data in means good data out. Outdated or inaccurate data can affect the accuracy of your marketing analytics and decision-making. Check data for inconsistencies, incorrect formatting, spelling errors, and duplicate data, and train employees to input data correctly to ensure your data's continued integrity and quality.

4. Analyze and apply your data

To make the most of your data, you need to analyze it. Integrating and organizing your data makes it easier to analyze and activate. You can leverage the insights gained from analysis to adjust and optimize marketing strategies or create new ones based on data patterns and trends. Today, it's often possible to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automatically clean these insights.

5. Effectively communicate data across teams

Effective marketing requires significant collaboration between teams across the organization. Marketing teams need to communicate findings with product development and sales departments as well as management. 

Summarizing data into actionable reports for each team makes cross-company collaboration easier and helps them to see how your marketing campaigns are impacting their individual goals.

How a CDP and CDW can help with marketing data management

Manual marketing data management can be a complicated and heavy lift, especially if you’re starting from the ground floor. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be a manual process. The right tools, such as a cloud data warehouse (CDW) and customer data platform (CDP), make all the difference.

A cloud data platform like Snowflake is essentially a system that consolidates data from multiple channels. It pulls data from each individual system that contains it, and then cleans, organizes, and structures this data. 

Meanwhile, a customer data platform like the Simon CDP accesses all of the raw data contained in your CDW and converts it into a usable format — in the form of customer profiles, audiences, segments, personalized campaigns, and more.

In short, these two systems work together to help you better manage your marketing data so that you can put it to use. They also make it easier to comply with each of the best practices discussed above.

Ready to get a better handle on your business’s marketing data management processes? Take a look at our CDP Buyer’s Guide to learn more about what to look for as you evaluate your options.

Interested in learning more about how Simon Data and Snowflake can help you truly unlock the power of your marketing and customer data? Request a demo today.