Trudging Through the Muck

How to manage your marketing data cleanly and seamlessly.

What’s the value of marketing analytics these days? So high, apparently, that companies plan to increase budgets for it over the next three years by 198%, according to a recent CMO survey.

There’s little doubt that marketing analytics offers a treasure trove of customer information and performance insight critical to overall business success. Which is why you’d think that managing marketing data with existing tools like Marketo, CRMs, and other analytics systems would be a much more agile and rigorous process than it actually is.

Instead, you’re probably familiar with a few of these data management challenges that prevent your marketing data pipeline from running smoothly:

• Dirty, duplicate, error-prone data
• Growing volumes of data that affect quality and manageability
• Too many manual processes
• Not enough time to update and modify data sets
• Database limits that put the squeeze on you just when you need the most timely and accurate answers

But since nearly 70% of marketing leaders expect to make the majority of their decisions using data — for everything from building, personalizing, and executing the next campaign to targeting, reaching, and forming deeper customer segments — there has to be a way to overcome these roadblocks.

Fortunately, managing clean marketing data with less time, headache, and effort is achievable. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest data management challenges, especially as they pertain to Marketo, and the solution that can bring greater speed, scale, and efficiency to your team.

Database limitations and workflow woes

Marketo provides several invaluable campaign performance tools that help track marketing success and convert higher quality leads. But most Marketo accounts come with a limit to the number of contacts that can be stored. Nearing the maximum number, your team may have to move contacts to another system to avoid incurring a costly account upgrade. Or, your team could let updates that desperately need to happen fall by the wayside because it’s too time-consuming to go over each record with a fine-tooth comb.

Even though everyone is doing the best they can with available tools and current capacity, the result is that your data ends up full of errors or spread across multiple systems, leading to missed opportunities and enormous inefficiency.

Errors don’t just happen at the record-entry level either. Because data comes in at a fast clip through various digital channels, such as web forms and emails, it’s often difficult to root out bad data and inconsistencies as they’re happening to ensure that you can build accurate and detailed customer profiles later. And without spotless, complete profiles, it’s much harder to know if your campaigns will land where they’re supposed to, let alone resonate.

But the manual effort that teams have to make to manipulate and enrich data is beyond what most of them can realistically devote time to. Marketers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their effort on the creative process, not slogging through a data cleansing exercise.

Yet the problem is that no matter how well-crafted the creative, it won’t mean anything if it can’t reach the intended audience or inspire anyone to engage with it. This kind of “failure to launch” can quickly lead to a domino effect of lower conversion rates and less revenue earned.

Automated data enrichment and appending for greater performance

Getting true ROI out of Marketo means finding an automated solution that can seamlessly integrate with your Marketo Instance and turn its huge potential into clean, enriched data and actionable insights.

A third-party, Marketo-certified data management tool like Vertify can:

• Automate workflows for greater speed, productivity, and efficiency
• Enable real-time email and contact validation to improve deliverability
• Give you total control over data types, sources, and volume to increase accuracy, verify appropriately, and eliminate unnecessary fees from too many contacts
• Make your existing data more useful so you can build deeper customer segments and increase campaign performance

Cleaner, more useful data and easier, automated data management processes free up more of your team’s resources to focus on where you can really provide value: crafting relevant messaging, generating the best leads and routing them to the right sales teams, and repurposing existing content for new audiences.

At a time when no one can afford to be without marketing analytics, your data tools should at least earn their keep by delivering the insights and outcomes your business needs to drive growth, in the most efficient and effective ways possible.