One of the biggest challenges modern marketers face is trying to make sense of marketing performance data that is scattered across various platforms and isolated in different silos.
A study conducted in 2022 revealed that 99% of marketing teams manage data from over 10 sources, leading many Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of their data.
So, how can you address this issue? The answer lies in bringing all your fragmented data together into one unified source of truth.
Consolidating and standardizing your data in a centralized location is a major step forward for many businesses. It eliminates data silos and makes it possible to draw meaningful comparisons, offering more insightful analysis.
However, for businesses to truly unlock the value of their data, simple consolidation isn’t enough. To fully harness the potential of the data your business holds, it needs to be enhanced or enriched. This is where the process of data enrichment becomes crucial.
What Is Data Enrichment?
Understanding data enrichment can be challenging because it is defined in different ways depending on its context, particularly in customer data management and data integration.
In customer data management, data enrichment refers to the process of enhancing your existing customer records by appending additional information, often from third-party sources.
For example, let’s say your customer database includes basic customer details such as name, postal address, and email address, but only a few records have a phone number. Using a third-party, GDPR-compliant solution, you could enrich your data by filling in the missing phone numbers, making your database more comprehensive.
In the context of data integration, data enrichment refers to enhancing the value of your existing data during the integration process through automated data cleaning, automated calculations, and data transformation.
In this article, we’ll focus on this second definition of data enrichment and explore how it can make your data more accurate and valuable for analysis and decision-making.
How Can Data Enrichment Help Marketing Teams?
For data-driven marketers, having accurate, consistent, and relevant data is essential for making optimization decisions that drive higher marketing ROI. Let’s explore how enriched data can specifically benefit marketing teams.
Consistency in Currency
A common issue faced by global marketing teams is the inconsistency of currencies across various marketing platforms.
Imagine you’re trying to analyze the performance of your best-performing channels and campaigns, but some platforms use USD, others use GBP, and some use EUR. This makes it challenging to compare data accurately and extract meaningful insights about campaign performance.
While you could manually convert and standardize the currencies, it’s time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies due to fluctuating exchange rates.
Leading data integration tools can automatically convert currencies based on the latest exchange rates, ensuring consistency across all your marketing channel data. This simplifies comparisons and accurately reflects the true performance and ROI of your campaigns.
Standardization of Language
For global businesses, it’s common to have data from different regions in multiple languages. This can lead to confusion and misinterpretation when centralized marketing teams try to analyze the data.
Although it’s important for local offices and agencies to work in their native languages, it can complicate performance analysis from a global perspective.
This is where data transformation tools with automated language translation become invaluable. These tools automate the translation of your data into a standardized language for centralized analysis while keeping the original data localized.
This method allows global marketing teams to make direct comparisons using enriched data, minimizing the risk of misinterpretation due to language differences.
Joining Different Data Sources
Another powerful data enrichment feature in leading data integration platforms is the ability to seamlessly join data from different sources. This can provide new insights into how you understand and analyze your marketing data.
For example, let’s say you have a cross-channel marketing strategy where each of your most profitable products or services is targeted to different audiences. As long as you have a unique identifier (such as a product ID) in the campaign or ad group name, advanced data enrichment tools can join data from multiple sources where that identifier appears.
This enables you to generate a detailed, SKU-level or service-level marketing report, offering a comprehensive view of performance across different channels. This type of data enrichment empowers marketers to optimize campaigns and make better strategic decisions.
Adding Dimensions to Data
Some data transformation tools allow marketing teams to add new dimensions to their data by using delimiters in text fields, enabling easy filtering and deeper analysis.
For example, suppose your campaign names are structured as: Channel – Country – Category – SKU. Using the right data integration platform, you could split the campaign name into multiple filterable data points, offering rich, multi-dimensional insights.
This opens up the possibility for filtering data based on various dimensions—such as comparing category performance across different countries or analyzing SKU performance in different markets. By adding these new dimensions, marketers can uncover trends and insights that would otherwise remain hidden in a less structured dataset.
Improving Data Quality
Data enrichment is essential for improving data quality, which refers to the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of your business data. High-quality data is the foundation for accurate analysis, and it plays a key role in ensuring that teams across your organization can trust the data they use for decision-making.
Data enrichment platforms help improve data quality by standardizing formats, cleaning erroneous data, and eliminating duplicates. These actions help maintain the accuracy, integrity, and reliability of your central data source, making it a more dependable tool for making important decisions.
Better Decision-Making and Stronger Marketing ROI
Another significant benefit of data enrichment is the ability to tailor data to the specific needs of your business.
While most data integration platforms offer standard enrichments, some advanced platforms allow data teams to create custom enrichments that refine data to meet the specific objectives of your marketing strategies. Tailored data aligned with your marketing goals provides proactive, actionable insights, boosting decision-making processes and improving ROI.
By leveraging enhanced data, businesses can make more informed decisions, ensuring better marketing performance and a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Ready to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Data?
In today’s data-driven world, understanding and managing your data effectively is essential for making informed business decisions.
Consolidating your data into a centralized repository is a crucial step for breaking down silos and enabling more insightful analysis.
But to truly unlock the value of your data, it needs to be structured, enriched, and aligned with your business needs. A powerful data integration platform with robust enrichment capabilities ensures data quality and enhances the value of your data for quicker, more effective insights and decision-making.
By using advanced data integration tools, businesses can transform their data into a strategic asset that provides a competitive edge and drives marketing ROI.
