Data Matters More Than Ever

Macey-Williams

By Macey Williams

April 17, 2024

Data is to a marketer as gold is to a miner. The prevalence of social media and the constant influx of trends pose challenges, making it imperative for companies to navigate through the noise and avoid being overshadowed.
Achieving business growth hinges on how effectively consumer data can be utilised. Identifying the target audience, reaching them effectively, and fostering engagement to forge meaningful connections, elevating brand awareness, affinity, and revenue.
The strategic handling of data has never been more important. The marketing landscape evolves with changes in regulations, policies, and consumer behaviours. As users are engaging with an average of 6.9 platforms monthly, it’s crucial for marketers to utilise data effectively, ensuring there is brand visibility where consumers spend the majority of their time.

Data Hygiene

To unlock the full potential of company data, meticulous cleaning and preparation are prerequisites for onboarding, matching, and activation. Maintaining data hygiene practices ensures optimal addressability and enhances the efficacy of data-driven strategies. The straightforward process involves consolidating disparate consumer data sources within an organisation to establish a unified, accurate consumer profile.
To unlock the full potential of company data, it must be cleaned and prepared for onboarding, matching and activation. Maintaining proper hygiene practices for data allows marketers to ensure their assets are being given a greater chance of being addressable once onboarded. Clean data often results in marketers being able to maximise their efficacy of data-driven strategies.
The process of cleaning data is straight forward and uniform. All disparate sources of consumer data within an organisation across CRMs, enterprise resource planning, consumer data platforms, and other platforms should be brought together and unified to establish a single source of consumer truth.
Data hygiene is important for successful onboarding and should not be viewed as just a process contributing toward marketing activations. Onboarding and the resulting insights can offer more effective initiatives across enterprises, ranging from customer service and product development to upper-level decision making.
Informatic Communication Investment (ICI) effectively combines real-time results across all platforms, acting as a single source of truth. With results readily available for marketers to use for strategic planning, campaigns or decision making, this platform is an example of efficient data hygiene and onboarding.

Quality over Quantity

As marketers we understand not all data is equal and the importance of quality when it comes to the data chosen to power a brand’s efforts and guide their organisation. With the concept of ‘big data’ nestling itself into the spotlight, many marketers are under the impression that ‘more is better’. This mentality is not logical. The concept of ‘more is more’ means nothing if the data is not of high quality. For this reason, it is crucial marketers are maintaining fidelity when looking to clean and onboard data.
When searching for high quality data marketers typically look to partners that are known for their data quality, breadth, and depth. Data can easily be claimed as being high quality and accurate. When considering partners to unite and supplement a company’s own first-party insights, marketers should evaluate the company’s claims and validations made by unbiased third parties. Doing so will build confidence and trust in data decisions when forging partnerships.
Trust in data decisions is crucial when looking to forge a partnership. ICI unifies the data, so marketers have a complete view of their entire marketing ecosystem, empowering them to make better data-driven decisions and giving them full confidence in their data.
To reach a target audience effectively and efficiently, marketers need to place an emphasis on proven, quality data assets.

Addressability

When a company utilises quality data hygiene and matching to onboarding, the desired outcome is to enable marketers to confidently reach their target audience across multiple channels. As the landscape of media consumption is ever-changing, addressability comes to mean more than connecting a company’s offline data into online audiences for targeting. The concept of addressability, and the underlying characteristics of it, are more robust and scrutinized than ever before.
The bigger picture is understanding the relationship between individuals and how they choose to engage with their devices. It is about realising how those individuals and their devices are part of a broader household, or how their preferences and behaviours differ. Such consumer complexity is prevalent regardless of the channel. It also means that addressability can mean different things.
Marketers should not have to sacrifice their addressability – meaning their process of bringing data into an addressable format needs to accommodate various uses designed to support a variety of channels and environments, both online and offline. An excellent example is ICI, as it provides marketers with analytics software that harmonises all performance data into one holistic platform.

Tying it all Together

As marketing tactics evolve, data and consumer identity will persist as indispensable tools in the marketer’s arsenal. Navigating this evolution requires solutions from partners that prioritize quality and accuracy. ICI is leading the charge in quality and accuracy for their partners. Among all the change, one this is certain, the foundations of quality and accuracy will remain paramount for data-driven marketing strategies.