This is how modern data management in marketing works
Data plays a central role in every area of business today. In marketing, too, the mantra has long been: “It all starts with data.” Quality, reliability, and ease of use are key to success, explains Patrick Galig of Dun & Bradstreet Switzerland.
Information is the new currency of companies. The preparation of data is essential for well-functioning processes in all areas of a company. The successful companies today are those that have their data so well under control that it can serve as a high-quality basis for their decisions. After all, data-driven companies have a massive advantage over their competitors. They grow faster, post fewer losses, close deals faster, are more successful in acquiring new customers, and operate marketing much more efficiently overall.
The clean data basis as a cornerstone
The most important basis is first of all a clean database. Everything starts with up-to-date and complete master data. Outdated addresses and telephone numbers or the wrong contact person will slow down even the best marketing ideas and cost time and money.
Master data, also referred to as master data, is the basic data that is of crucial importance within business processes. This can be material, customer, product or supplier data, for example. They form the basis for automated processes in companies. With the masses of data available to us and held, organizing the data is a basic part of daily work.
The central component is master data management (MDM), which involves managing this data. It is collected, selected and analyzed. Time and again, it becomes apparent that there is often a lack of powerful MDM. Even the best data is of no use if it is not available to the respective departments via a suitable system. This results in tedious manual data maintenance, unusable data silos and doubts about the reliability of the data.
Evaluate and check
Since clean data is the prerequisite for successful marketing - and many other processes in the company - the first step is to evaluate the data situation and put the existing master data management to the test: Which data from which sources is recorded where in the company and what quality does it have? Even if there is no blanket solution for MDM, a summary and uniform structuring of existing data can result in considerable leaps in quality.
It is important to consider from the outset who is to work with the respective data, which data sets and sources are relevant for this purpose, and what form target-oriented harmonization can take that takes into account the requirements of individual departments. It therefore makes sense not to leave MDM to the IT department alone, but to actively involve other departments at an early stage.
Next step: enrichment
Once all the requirements for classic master data management have been met, the master data can be enriched or refined. Today, companies have huge data lakes at their disposal. These are pools of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. They come from a wide variety of sources such as the Internet and telephone, credit and customer cards, social media, sensor logs, or traffic and healthcare. The aim is to store, analyze and evaluate these large volumes of data in order to perform trend analyses and product control, for example.
Marketing thus has information on the industry, company size, turnover and much more, and thus gains a comprehensive picture. This is the basis for segmentation and targeting, which massively improves the success rate of any marketing activity. Instead of sending the same mailing to all your prospects, you can look for commonalities and create three, four or even five different target groups. If you sharpen the approach and the offer for each of them, you will rapidly improve your success rate.
Especially since the powerful MDM avoids typical errors and thus employee frustration: These include postal returns and unnecessary telephone calls due to outdated address data, incorrect salutations ("Dear Mrs. Max Mustermann") and duplicate mailings - Company X may be the subsidiary of Company Y or the two may belong to the same group. With this information, you determine the right recipient and prevent writing to prospects twice.
Similar advantages also arise for sales or support. While the marketer can clearly define which target group segment the customer to be addressed belongs to, the sales department would be more interested in the customer's order history. And support works better if it knows which products a customer is currently using or how long it takes to send a service technician.
Care, care, care
The decisive factor here is the "Infinite loop", the permanent data maintenance. Ideally, this should be largely automated. If the e-mail program receives three error messages from the server indicating that an address is no longer correct, it is deleted. But marketing itself and the other departments should also be actively involved in data maintenance in order to prevent new data silos from being created, for example, because employees manually create their own Excel list.
Companies that want to remain competitive should take advantage of the potential offered by the combination of powerful master data management and big data analytics. Virtually every area of a company can benefit from optimized data use.
* Patrick Galig is Executive Director Marketing DACH & CEE at Dun & Bradstreet Switzerland.
