Survey: Improving Data Quality is a Critical Objective of Marketing Data Strategy

According to a recent Ascend2 survey, “Marketing Data Quality Trends,” the majority of marketers (62 percent) agree that improving data quality is the most important objective of a successful marketing data strategy.

Other crucial objectives include improving marketing data analytics (45 percent), integrating sales and marketing data (44 percent) and improving the user experience (43 percent).

These data strategy objectives are also critical challenges for many marketers. Nearly half (46 percent) of those surveyed find improving marketing data quality a challenge to data strategy success. An additional 41 percent find integrating sales and marketing data a challenge, and 38 percent cite budget acquisition as a significant challenge.

Despite the challenges, 83 percent of marketing influencers do consider their marketing data strategy successful to some extent with 34 percent referring to it as “very successful.”

According to survey respondents, the most effective tactic for improving data quality is validating contact data as it’s collected from online contact forms (49 percent). Surveyors note that “[Validating contact data] has also become a very popular automated process that is easily integrated into online contact forms.”

Other tactics to improve data quality include assigning data quality responsibility (47 percent), integrating sales and marketing data (42 percent) and standardizing data upload process (34 percent).

Poor Data Quality Impacts B2B Lead Generation

Another study from Integrate found 40 percent of leads generated from B2B marketers have poor data quality. This poor data quality includes duplicate data, invalid entries, failed email/address validation, and missing form fields.

The report states that bad quality data, also called “dirty data” in the report, impacts B2B marketing plans because it not only undermines your company’s quality content efforts (by not properly getting them to the highest quality leads), but it can also lead to low response and click-through rate, meaning that your marketing budgets may suffer.