Marketing Data Quality: How Can a Marketing Dashboard Help?

Nearly 75 percent of marketers can’t measure or report how their efforts impact their business. That’s a problem because 95% of C-level executives say that data is an integral part of forming their business strategy. 

The reason that reporting on marketing data quality is so difficult isn’t that marketers are lazy or that they don’t care about data quality. There are some challenging barriers to accurate and complete reporting. They include:

• Multiple data sources
• Inconsistent or poor data hygiene
• Complex and error-prone Excel spreadsheets
• No insight into the quality of data

You can read more information in our blog about data blindness in marketing and how it’s hurting businesses. 

Fortunately, these issues can all be addressed with marketing operations dashboards that turn data into actionable information. With the right technology in place, marketers can make better decisions, predict campaign results, and provide executives with the intelligence they need to make strategic decisions.

What Is a Marketing Operations Dashboard? 

A marketing operations dashboard is your way of visualizing information about your marketing data. It should give you a complete and unbiased view of all of the contacts and companies in your database. 

Your marketing data dashboard should make gaps in data and poor data quality immediately apparent. It should make it easy to provide executives with information related to the health of marketing data and help justify additional investment where it is needed. 

Ideally, your dashboard will include: 

Data Quality by Segment

Most B2B marketers have a number of target segments. You could be segmented by company size, product fit, industry, geography, or past purchases. In any case, it is necessary to understand the data quality for each target audience. 

Your marketing dashboard should make it easy to view and compare the quality of each segment vs. another. This helps you identify trends within each audience and develop more effective campaigns by sector. You’ll be able to track how the quality of segment data changes over time and rectify any gaps by the audience.

Data Benchmarks and Trends

Is your marketing data quality improving over time, or getting worse? If you aren’t managing it, it is probably getting worse. That’s because each year, 30 percent of people change jobs, 43 percent change phone numbers, 37 percent change emails, and 20 percent change addresses. Keeping data accurate requires active management. If you don’t know where the problems are, you can’t fix them.

Your marketing data dashboard should enable you to track data trends with ease. You shouldn’t be at the mercy of IT for reports or be forced to become an Excel spreadsheet master to be able to show executives data baselines, benchmarks, trends, and improvements.  

With the right operations dashboard in place, you’ll get a standard set of scoring metrics for data quality. It will be easy to identify issues when they occur with regular monitoring, and you’ll have data quality baselines and benchmarks to share.

Total Addressable Market

The first order of business for marketers is understanding who they are marketing to. By this, I don’t mean just understanding your buyer personas. I mean the actual names and contact information for every potential buyer of your product. Are you confident that your database is complete? If you are like most marketers, the answer is a resounding no.

Fortunately, with a quality marketing dashboard that is integrated with available databases, this is a solvable problem. 

Imagine a world where you can compare your marketing database to the universe of contacts and accounts. What if you could identify the segments that are missing data and rectify the problem? 

This is all possible with modern marketing analytics technology.

Automated Data Management

Ideally, you’ll opt for a marketing data dashboard that integrates with your CRM and marketing automation platforms. This way, you’ll have a centralized view of data that includes all sources and is updated in real-time.  The best solutions trigger data validation, enrichment, and other automated workflows based on the data characteristics that you set up. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have data that is always clean, complete, and ready to use?

In 2020 and beyond, successful marketers will be those that can create effective campaigns, targeted with precision to buyers at the right moment in their customer journey. None of that is possible without accurate, current, and complete data. A marketing data quality dashboard is the way to get there. 

Think it’s impossible? We’d love the chance to change your mind.