As a marketer, you deal with numerous data from all avenues ranging from social media and website visits to fill-out forms.
With businesses leveraging data for business growth and a competitive edge, all the data you collect is an asset that can propel your business to greater heights.
To get the best out of your marketing data, you need to take proper data management measures to ensure the information you collect serves its purpose and does not fall into the wrong hands or get lost.
You should also comply with current data regulations to avoid fines and penalties.
Here Are Tips To Help You Manage Your Marketing Data:
1. Implement Data Security Measures
Your marketing data should always be secure and up to date to meet existing data and privacy laws and regulations.
To protect your marketing data from cyber-attacks, loss, unauthorized access, or natural disasters, create and implement robust security measures in compliance with the law.
You can maintain data security by restricting access to a few authorized individuals and encrypting data to make it unreadable if it falls into the wrong hands.
Also, conduct regular audits and penetration testing and fix any loopholes that may jeopardize the safety of your marketing data.
Besides safeguarding your data, ensure you back it up to avoid losing it permanently in case of a data breach or disaster.
2. Integrate Your Data
Marketing data can come from various sources, and every database may have different characteristics, making it difficult to unify them. Regardless, it is advisable to have one source of clean and reliable data.
Utilize data integration platforms like Operations Hub to make the process easier. On the same note, avoid data silos and storing different forms of data in different systems as it prevents optimal performance of your marketing or sales team.
Integrated data gives you a uniform overview of valuable information, thus promoting efficiency and optimal data utilization.
3. Data Quality over Quantity
It is better to have quality data that aligns with your marketing goals than lots of useless or irrelevant data that does nothing than clog your marketing data storage. With this in mind, promote data quality by only collecting and retaining the data you need.
Also, ensure that the data you enter manually is free of errors, as any slight mistake can result in lost opportunities and inefficiencies.
To improve the quality of your data, provide a specific format for entering data during collection. Also, incorporate data validation to control into online forms to check the validity of the information.
Lastly, train your employees to appreciate the importance of quality data. Doing so creates awareness and maintains high data quality standards.
4. Avoid Data Duplication
Data duplication can jeopardize the accuracy of your marketing data. You can avoid data duplication by cross-referencing different systems or data units to find those with similar characteristics.
Once you identify duplicate or redundant data, delete it as part of your data cleaning routine to avoid inaccurate statistics and poor analytical outcomes.
For example, returning customers can leave records like contacts or addresses twice when they come back for second purchases.
As such, you should have an audit system that can automatically identify and remove the duplicated data to save you the trouble. Consider auditing your data continuously to keep it clean and accurate.
Marketing data can provide insights into customer needs and help you create valuable connections with your present and potential clients.
It can also help you improve your products and services, explore growth opportunities and identify working marketing strategies, and those you should improve all abandon altogether.
The above tips can help you manage your marketing data better, stay compliant and maintain data integrity and safety.
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