If just having data was enough, those of us with databases would be home and dry; we’d all be making informed decisions, understanding who wants our products, engaging with the right people, and building an extremely healthy pipeline. But it’s clear that simply having data is not enough to make an organisation data driven. It’s how you collect it, store it, maintain it, and use it that does.
The moral of the tale?
Being data rich doesn’t necessarily make your data healthy.
Organisations strive for big data, the more the better, right? Well, perhaps not. The irony is the more you have the more unwieldy it becomes. Accurate, sound business decisions can only be made using data that is clean, up to date, accurate and intelligence rich i.e. healthy. To be useful, data must be comprehensive, compliant, accurate and trusted. Can you say this about your data?
What is the definition of data health?
It will mean different things to different organisations, but Talend sums it up as being data that is “easily discoverable, understandable, and of value to the people that need to use it, and these characteristics are sustained throughout its lifecycle. You’ll know that your organization’s data is healthy when you can prove that it’s valid, complete, and of sufficient quality to produce analytics that decision-makers can feel comfortable relying on for business decisions.” (Source: Talend)
If your data supports your business objectives, it can be described as healthy.
Talend goes on to advise that creating and maintaining data health is a key constituent of ensuring the continuation of data driven marketing success and, should therefore, involve constant monitoring and intervention across the entire life cycle of your data. Organisation-wide data health is only possible when an organisation combines three key elements:
Data agility to quickly deliver data to those who need it
Data culture shared throughout the organisation
Data trust within and across departments
Despite this sage advice, it is uncanny how difficult organisations find it to maintain data health. As a ‘creature’ data is notoriously fickle. It changes, it morphs, it is easily replaced, can be ephemeral and rapidly goes stale if not kept impeccably clean and tidy.
Data can also be a victim of its own success. The vast quantities that are now created make it an unwieldy beast. The speed with which it can change can make it unreliable. The regulatory environment within which it sits is constantly changing and the experience and diligence of the people entrusted with its usage has morphed from data techs to employees with little data knowledge or expertise.
The bottom line must be that organisations holding and using data must fulfil their obligations to tend it carefully and treat it with respect. Both to ensure the privacy and protection of its provenance and also to ensure its longevity and constructive use moving forwards.
Does your data need a refresh?
If you’re worried about the state of your database, it’s time to review and revitalise!
As we have said, data doesn't stay clean and fresh for long. Data needs revitalising and reinvigorating to stay useful and beneficial to your needs. If upgrading or cleansing data has been on the back burner during Covid, it's highly likely that it is now tired, stale, and incomplete.
Therefore, we have a couple of simple questions for you:
Is your data good enough to get your message in front of decision makers?
Can your data identify potential prospects based on current install intelligence and stats and provide up to date and accurate contact data?
If the answer to either question is no, or if you are unsure, it's time to undertake a data refresh to make the most of your marketing capability going forwards. ProspectaBase can help refresh your data with a data matching exercise. We take your data and match it against ProspectaBase, sending you a report proving how we can enhance and improve your contacts, which will give you better ROI on your marketing campaigns.
Marketing departments tend to use ‘gated content’ as a means of gathering prospect data and generating leads from web form fills. Typically, a web form sits on top of thought leadership collateral such as whitepapers or survey results but can also be a gateway for event or webinar registrations. Whatever the gate is designed for, its outcome is usually the same - to gather company and contact details to populate a CRM or marketing database for sales follow up. The challenge is that fake or inaccurate details can be entered which results in databases being filled with poor intelligence, which leads to wasted sales efforts.
PureData is the answer to clean and intelligent B2B marketing data. The service eliminates ‘mickey mouse’ form fills (including B2C domains) to avoid compliance issues and injects only the most pure and accurate B2B data to your CRM.
PureData turns basic, dirty data into intelligent, clean data. It adds infrastructure intelligence to new accounts, to create intelligence rich leads for personalised, targeted telemarketing or eMarketing.
You wouldn’t run a car or a boiler without giving it an annual service, the same should apply to your database.