You understand that marketing data plays a vital role in setting marketing goals and measuring your performance against them. But what if your marketing data is too messy to do anything with?

All is not lost. The first bit of good news is that you already have data on hand! Even if you’re unaware of it, just about every digital marketing tool, app, or platform collects valuable data.

And second, once you clean up that data and put systems in place to organize and use it, your data will be tidy going forward. Yes, that means some work in the short term, but it will pay dividends over time.

So what do you do if you’ve got a pile of marketing data and not much else?

1. Take inventory.

Begin by assessing what you’re trying to sort through. Sit down and evaluate:

• All of your data sources. This might be your website, social media profiles, email marketing service, etc.
• Whether you have access to pull that data. Are you an admin on all platforms where this marketing data lives? If not, time to reach out to colleagues and ensure you can get in there.
• Where you’re collecting data right now. Are you already pulling some data into a spreadsheet, dashboard, pile of files on your shared drive–anything? If so, you’ll want to know where it is.
• Whether any of your data is duplicative. For example, are you getting social media stats within the Facebook business admin page and again through your social management platform?
• Whether you can trust all current sources of data. For example, if your website isn’t tracking cookies properly, you might have gaps in your site visitor data.

2. Identify what you want from your data.

Once you know the basics about your data, you need to think about what you want to do next.

There’s no one answer to how a business uses its marketing data best. It really depends on what broader business goals you want to achieve.

Maybe you run a subscription service and desperately need to slow your churn rate. Perhaps you have a B2C that sees tons of traction on social media that never quite converts into sales.

Sit down with your team and brainstorm all the things you’d like your data to be able to tell you. What can your data tell you about how your marketing efforts can support business goals?

3. Start with tidying up one area.

If your data is a disaster across the board, you can’t fix it all at once. Instead, focus on the area where you most stand to gain.

Again, this is going to look different for you than it will for your friendly marketing neighbors.

If you’ve worked hard to build a robust email list with oodles of contacts, maybe you want to start cleaning house in your email marketing system.

Your app or website data might be most valuable to you if you run an online community with a paid monthly membership.

Things will get messier before they improve, so resist the urge to dismantle all your marketing data everywhere. If you pull it all apart, you’ll be standing in a cluttered pile of data while more information continues to roll in from all your data sources. I’m getting sweaty palms just thinking about it! Truly, start small.

4. Assess data quality…

Now that you’ve decided where to focus your efforts, it’s time to give that pile of data a much closer look. Poor data quality is the first hurdle you have to clear. If your data’s bad, it doesn’t matter how nicely you’ve organized it in a spreadsheet. It will not tell you anything meaningful.

What do we mean when we talk about data quality? What you’re assessing is whether or not your data is:

• Accurate: Is the information correct?
• Complete: Are significant chunks of important information missing, or do you have all the pieces you need?
• Consistent: Is the information consistent enough to draw conclusions? We all know that apples to apples make for an easier comparison than apples to oranges.
• Timely and relevant: Is the data fresh enough to tell you something valuable, or is your intel stale?

Let’s look at email marketing data as an example. It’s so easy for email data to get messy. It’s coming from countless sources, so data cleanliness is not a given.

For example, individuals who’ve input their own email addresses to subscribe to your mailing list may have mistyped their contact information.

Or, if your submission forms don’t require all fields to be filled, you may have some contact information that’s complete and other entries that are simply a first name and email address. These discrepancies in completeness also mean your data as a whole is inconsistent.

Do you have a ton of email addresses that are bouncing? This is often a problem for B2B marketers; email subscribers leave their jobs, their business emails are deactivated, and you’re left with a pile of outdated, invalid addresses.

5. …Then address data quality.

The first step is admitting you have a data problem. The next step is doing something about it. Cleaning up your data is tedious but necessary work.

If you’re dealing with your email marketing system, go into your system and start cleaning out those hard bounces. Correct the spelling of contact names. Ensure all profiles have the information and tags you need to move ahead with future segmentation efforts.

Part of your cleanup effort should be creating processes to prevent garbage data from getting into your system going forward.

If, for example, you see that most email addresses only have a first name attached when you want to know more, ensure your email capture forms all require the desired information. Update your website forms to ensure consistency across all pages, so you know that all the information coming into your system will be complete and correctly formatted from now on.

We know it’s a lot of work to get your data into fighting shape, but we have also seen firsthand the value of building a marketing strategy grounded in real, timely, accurate customer data.

6. Now, you can put your data to work.

Your data is now clean and in usable condition. Woohoo! Let’s get to it.

Again, start small. Your data can’t solve all the world’s problems at once, but it can help you answer some critical questions that may have been weighing on you for a while.

Maybe you’re that subscription business that’s struggling with churn. Looking into email data for subscribers you’ve recently lost might yield some clues about their dissatisfaction.

If you’re the B2C dealing with high social media engagement and low sales, you might create an abandoned cart email sequence to push folks over the finish line. You can track open rates and conversion rates for those emails. Better yet, you might A/B test your messaging and watch how your emails perform against each other.

You went through a lot of hard work to get this data into a usable state, so don’t peek at it once and then forget about it! Data is best at helping you identify patterns, and patterns take time to develop.

Establish a workflow for your team that asks you to include data in your review and decision-making processes. Consider creating a dashboard that includes your top KPIs and revisit it on a set cadence.

Regular check-ins mean it’s easier to course-correct if the numbers show something is off.

7. Conquer your next data hurdle.

Once you’ve got your most critical data cleaned, organized, and working for you, it’s time to move on to your other data streams.

We know it’s a lot of work to get your data into fighting shape, but we have also seen firsthand the value of building a marketing strategy grounded in real, timely, accurate customer data. You’ve got this! And if you need some help, we’re here.

Ready to talk data? Let’s chat.