Another Valentine’s Day is behind us. For many of us, that means a huge sigh of relief – because you either love the holiday and celebrate it with gusto OR you hate it and try everything to ignore the red and pink heart promotional explosion everywhere you look!
Personally, I’m not a fan of Valentine’s Day. Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve been married for 20+ years and have two wonderful children so there’s a whole lotta love in my life. But I kind of have a problem with all the hype and the overpriced restaurant menus, as well as the huge expectation that if you love someone, you MUST do something grand to celebrate this most awesome holiday. A holiday that only comes once a year. One day. That’s it. In my opinion, every day should be considered special. If you’re lucky enough to have great people in your life, celebrate every day like it’s Valentine’s Day!
So…what the heck does this have to do with data???
While they don’t readily admit it, most organizations struggle with their relationship with data – from how they treat their data to how often they show their data the love. As a marketer, if you care – truly care – about your data, would you pay attention to it just once per year? Or would you consider it your responsibility and perhaps even one of your most important duties to ensure that every single day you care for your data? We shouldn’t just pay attention to our data only at the point that we acquire it. Instead, we should have an ongoing relationship that includes having a constant cleansing and validation practice in place.
Think about how much marketers rely on data. Would you be able to plan a program or execute a campaign properly without great data? How about analyzing and measuring your marketing performance? It’s absolutely not possible without valid and correct data. Despite our good intentions, we have a long way to go. Best-in-class marketers know that having high quality data makes their marketing efforts more successful. But did you know that 84% of marketers characterize the quality of their company’s marketing data as “somewhat good” or worse? Yikes!! We cannot possibly be successful and effective as marketers if the data that we rely upon isn’t any good. In fact, improving data quality continues to be the number 1 obstacle for most marketers:
I hope you consider yourself to be in the elite group of marketers that uses validated and trusted data every day. To find out what your peers are saying – and to read more about the impact of data quality on marketers everywhere – enjoy this benchmark report: “Data-Driven Marketing Trends: How and why data quality will optimize the effectiveness of your data-driven marketing strategy”. The report is based on research done by Ascend2, sponsored by Informatica in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet.
I choose to have a love relationship with my data instead of a hate relationship. How about you?
The post Do You Have a Love/Hate Relationship With Your Data? appeared first on The Informatica Blog - Perspectives for the Data Ready Enterprise.