Depending on the geography and sociology, its value is matched with the most precious entity on earth- gold, oil…name your poison.
But like everything precious, it is judged by the quality, the grade and the structure (think diamonds).
A very interesting report, “Why Marketers Can’t Ignore Data Quality,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Marketing Evolution, says the biggest part in a successful marketing campaign was played by high-quality data- almost 87%. Clearly, data is a significant player in creating effective marketing strategies.
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The research identifies seven dimensions that best define data quality: timeliness, completeness, consistency, relevance, transparency, accuracy, and representativeness.
But the report goes on to say that about ‘21 cents of every media dollar spent by organizations in the last year were wasted due to poor data quality, resulting in inaccurate targeting (35%) and lost customers (30%).” Clearly, the quality of data and its tenability to analysis is where its value lies. If high quality is maintained, it can empower marketers to effectively understand the preferences and inclination of customers. Essentially this will help influence shoppers at the right moment, while also demonstrating measurability of their spend.
Data that is not good enough to be used for deriving value can actually hurt strategies- and in the last year alone, 26% of marketing campaigns were hurt by substandard data. A big part of this loss is the resources spent on collating this data. The study referred above found that media spend was the biggest waste and the highest-ranked impact of poor data quality (37%). Poor data quality was responsible for the 21% loss of expenditure and came in next as the challenge that pulls down the value of data. Wrong, low quality and irrelevant data wasted 32% of marketing teams’ time, hurting almost a quarter of all the marketing campaigns in the last year.
The biggest learning – integrity, and quality is what makes a resource priceless. Data is not the jewel it is made out to be, it’s efficient and intelligent structuring and analysis that imparts it the value. It is intelligent derivation of insights that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.
These smart insights are the valuable entity- the strategies they create are the precious products- that can take an organization is new heights.
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