Marketing concerns: too much data, not enough quality

IDG and Avention have released the results of their study “Big Data for Marketing and Sales”, and have revealed that, despite the plethora of tools on the market, marketers are still concerned about the challenges they face in trying to improve the accuracy of their customer data.

Excessive data is also an issue, with the sheer quantity of many business’s datasets creating headaches when it comes to extracting actionable insights.

As part of the study, IDG surveyed 300 marketers in the US to gauge what their top data concerns were and found the “difficulty of extracting insights” the top concern (42%). Poor data quality was second (23%), while excessive data, number of data sources, list development time and time spent on admin were also major concerns.   

“The results of the study are important to marketers because the findings reinforce the true value big data plays when developing informed marketing strategies,” says Steve Pogorzelski, CEO, Avention.

“It also demonstrates the importance of having the right tools in place to ensure you are able to make smart decisions and puts focus back on the principle which should govern almost every move an organisation makes – driving business outcomes.”

The tools available to marketers are evolving rapidly, but despite more and more user-friendly solutions entering the market, the issues of data accuracy remain constant.  IDG’s report highlights that accuracy remains marketers’ “top priority” (66%), while data insights, customer information and predictive analytics also feature prominently.

The report suggests that in order to drive data transformation, organisations might be best placed focusing more on their long-term data strategy and the delivery of business impact, as opposed to data sources and trying to drive insight from large datasets.    

“To improve data accuracy, marketers must make a concentrated effort to assess the importance and value of the data they have on-hand. However, moving beyond data accuracy is critical. Marketers must determine what information is most relevant to the strategic direction of their business and use it to become a revenue driving department within their organisations at a level on par with Sales.”