What Can Data Operations Do for Your Company?

• Data
• Pardot
• Marketo
• Salesforce
• Marketing Cloud
• HubSpot
• MS Dynamics
• Google Cloud

 

Gartner found that 29% of the activities that will be part of the Marketing Operations Mandate in the next 12-24 months are data operations, more specifically: data sourcing, consolidation and management. There is no data-driven decision without good data; this is something that Macro has always paid particular attention to.

What Can Data Operations Do For Your Company? 

Data Operations and Management Webinar
Clean Up Your CRM Duplicate Data
Standardize Your Data
Prevent Data Decay
Better Reporting and Data-Driven Decisions
Lead Management and Qualification
Build a Full View of Your Customer
Evaluate the Business Impact of Good Data

In our last blog post we used an analogy to compare your marketing automation platform with a luxury car. One of the main points discussed was the importance of developing and fueling your marketing automation platform with data to drive revenue.

In this blog post, we’ll be diving deeper into marketing automation platform maintenance and how marketing data operations best practices form a crucial part of your revenue marketing machine. 

Think of data operations as the wheels in your marketing automation platform and process. Content fuels your vehicle and keeps it running - but the wheels make it move from point A to point B. When examining the customer journey of a persona or one of your typical prospects - they would enter your site - stumble on a piece of content, and submit their information. That data makes the wheels start turning, telling you where to go and at what speed. 

Let’s go into a little bit more detail about what data operations can do for your company. 

 

Data Operations and Management Webinar 

On September 10, 2020 we held a webinar which showcased OpenRefine, an open source data operations solution around data hygiene and management. Together with RefinePro, We discussed the consequences of bad data and how businesses can enhance their data operations practices to maintain quality assurance and generate better revenue attribution. Our colleagues at RefinePro shared a demo of OpenRefine, that you can watch in the full recording.

Throughout the webinar, we dove deep into just how seriously bad data can impact businesses - highlighting potential astonishing revenue losses of 12% and reputational damage as the result of wrongly targeting leads with the wrong message. 

But not all is lost  - we also discussed how to counteract and lower the risk of bad data by following proper high quality data selection practices, like validating data, and checking for data integrity and consistency. Check out the full recording the webinar for more info and insights into how you can improve your data operations. 

 

What is the Business Impact of Data Operations?

• Better Reporting and Data-Driven Decisions
• No objective decisions can be made with reports that pull in bad data
• Better MQLs / MQAs
• Avoid wasting time on unqualified Leads or Accounts
• Improve MOps Efficiency
• Less frustration with bloated systems
• Faster execution of campaigns
• Fewer system errors
• Better Customer Experiences!
  
   

Clean Up Your CRM Duplicate Data 

Your customer relationship management (CRM) platform contains critical data about the life cycles and stages of your prospects, existing customers, interaction activities and your marketing campaigns. Duplicate data can have a negative impact on your business’ ability to make correct decisions. A CRM that is littered with duplicate, compromised, or inconsistent data for example - can cause plenty of frustration for your sales and marketing teams. Imagine not being able to know who is a customer and who is a prospect because someone is tracked as both in different cases.

Why Duplicates Happen

There are many reasons why data gets duplicated:

• Sales reps might enter their information more than once.
• A list import based on CRM ID as opposed to emails can cause duplicates
• Someone is tracked as a Prospect for a product, while they are a customer of another product
• Data coming from API creates new records instead of updating existing records
• Your Marketing Automation platform is configured to allow multiple email addresses 
• Data captured via forms is not updating existing records

Therein enters one of the fundamental responsibilities of a data operations expert. They would begin by diving deep into your existing data, prioritize what matters and start deleting or merging any duplicate entries. This can be done manually or through a CRM add on.

After clearing out duplicate records from your CRM - a data operations expert would propose a solution to ensure that duplicates remain blocked so as to prevent this from happening again. 

At Macro, our data operations experts are trained in data management best practices. We can help your team create a standardized data entry process that reduces inconsistencies and ensures your team members have a clear understanding of what to do when entering new information into your CRM. It’s also a good idea to set up a schedule for maintaining your data. If you let your data pile up for a long time without regularly checking it for accuracy and duplication - you run the risk of compromising the quality and integrity of your data in the long run. Consider establishing a regular monthly practice of data monitoring and reminders, to make sure that your data remains top notch. Macro can help get this going, too. 

 

Standardize Your Data 

Our data operations team frequently receives requests to standardize data for our clients, but what does this mean, and how can you ensure that your data is standardized? Data standardization involves ensuring that your data can be easily matched to other data sets. It’s usually one of the first steps to take, when undergoing data analysis or collection. There are several ways you can standardize your data and organize it into different fields, below are some of the ways:

• Standardize Country and State fields
• Standardize your Company Names
• Always track Macromator as opposed to “Macromator Inc,”
• Clean up Lead Sources
• Clean up Campaign Naming for Campaigns and Activities and Touch Points

 

Prevent Data Decay 

According to ReachForce, bad data can cost your business money - reducing lead conversions at a cost of $83 per 100 records in your database. Left unmaintained, 2% of information in a marketing leads database runs the risk of going stale each month. Add to this the major problem of outdated email addresses and spam bots - and you could have a serious issue on your hands, where your compromised data is impacting your sales figures and conversion rates. 

Why Does Data Decay with Time?

There are several reasons why data decays with time - with one of the major factors being poor database maintenance and old records. Every once in a while, data needs to be examined for duplication, stale and old data and spam. If frequent database maintenance isn’t performed, then it decays and loses quality - causing you a loss in revenue and reputation. At Macro, we view our Data Operations Experts as the guardians of data integrity to keep your database up to date, giving you high quality data so that you can focus on executing campaigns that drive better results.  

 

Better Reporting and Data-Driven Decisions 

Faced with compromised data that is stalling your marketing automation platform, you might be asking yourself, ‘what’s the next step?’ Thankfully, Macro has plenty of skilled drivers that can perform maintenance, switch out broken wheels - and make sure your data arrives at the next destination. 

Learn more about what Macro recommends marketing reporting should focus on in the CMO’s Command Center. In short, CMOs should focus on year over year growth, tracking opportunities sourced by different departments, measuring paid and unpaid campaigns, and understanding your total addressable market. 

Good Data Drives Actionable Insights

Once you’ve taken the appropriate steps to clean up the data in your CRM, build your prospect list, and create insightful content - you’re ready to start gathering useful insights about your marketing campaigns. At this point, you would ideally have a clear understanding of the journey your customers take, and what kind of information they are in need of. Data is only as good as the insights you can draw from it, as it lets you better understand your target audience and customer needs.

 

Lead Management and Qualification 

Like adding a new part to upgrade your vehicle - your marketing database is no different as you should always be looking at new acquisition strategies. Developing a Content Marketing Strategy is a good way to enable your lead acquisition efforts. For example - developing engaging content for your prospect’s pain points, buying personas and different funnel stages, can generate many qualified leads. Always think about ways you can produce fresh content for your prospects to digest. When these leads come in, they will need to be processed and qualified. Our outsourced Data Operations experts can help you oversee this for the parts which cannot be automated.

 

Build a Full View of Your Customer 

Has a prospect given you their information but it’s missing a few key aspects, like their job title and location? These are often important pieces of data which play a crucial role regarding how your initial sales development representatives handle them. 

Not to worry, a marketing data operations expert can handle that, and we can show you how to hire one. It’s also critical that you understand the results that your analytics tools are showing you - so make sure you have resources available that can decipher actionable insights from your data. For example, taking a look at what your customer’s preferences are, what device they’re accessing your site from, and where they’re coming from geographically, are all key insights you can focus on to better target your marketing campaigns. 

Data Operations Experts can help in many ways. They can:

• Fill in missing Lead information
• Identify interests in different products or family of products
• Ensure there is no duplication created in the system
• Ensure your sales development representatives have a full picture
• Disqualify bad data to save time for your sales team

Best of all, having a resource that can fit the various puzzle pieces of your data together is indispensable. 

Do you have a substantial amount of potential leads that have entered incomplete data about themselves? A data operations specialist can do the research for you - and fill in the missing information. 

 

Evaluate the Business Impact of Good Data 

Better data = better business. The business impact of data operations goes beyond the maintenance of information in your CRM and building lists. The impact of a data operations specialist can be felt at the executive level and throughout  your whole organization. Having a dedicated data operations specialist comb through your data to ensure integrity and qualify leads to the right places, leading to better data-driven decisions. 

One of the biggest signs of a well maintained vehicle is how many miles it has -so think of a data operations specialist as someone that can extend the miles of your marketing automation platform and CRM.

Don’t get stuck suffering from the terrible effects of bad data - bring a data operations expert onboard today. You’ll be surprised by the positive impacts they can bring to your company. 

 

Data Operations and Management Webinar 

On September 10, 2020, we held a webinar which showecased OpenRefine, an open source data operations solution around data hygiene and management. Together with RefinePro, We discussed the consequences of bad data and how businesses can enhance their data operations practices to maintain quality assurance and generate better revenue attribution. Our colleagues at RefinePro shared a demo of OpenRefine, that you can watch in the full recording.

Throughout the webinar, we dove deep into just how seriously bad data can impact businesses - highlighting potential astonishing revenue losses of 12% and reputational damage as the result of wrongly targeting leads with the wrong message. 

But not all is lost  - we also discussed how to counteract and lower the risk of bad data by following proper high quality data selection practices, like validating data, and checking for data integrity and consistency. Check out the full recording the webinar for more info and insights into how you can improve your data operations.