One of the biggest challenges that many modern marketers face is trying to make sense of marketing performance data that is stuck in silos across multiple different platforms.
A study we conducted in 2022 found that 99% of marketing teams were managing data from more than 10 sources, which was a significant contributor to many CMOs feeling overwhelmed by their data.
The solution to this challenge? Bringing all your disparate data together into one single source of truth.
Consolidating and standardizing your data in a centralized location is a huge step forward for many businesses. It can help eliminate data silos and allow for more meaningful comparisons and insightful analysis.
However, for businesses that truly want to unlock the power of their data, consolidating it isn’t enough. To harness the full potential of the data your business holds, it needs to be enhanced or enriched.
This is where data enrichment as part of the data transformation process is important.
So, what is data enrichment?
Understanding data enrichment can be challenging, mainly due to varying definitions, particularly in the areas of customer data management and data integration.
In the context of customer data management, data enrichment helps you build more in-depth and comprehensive knowledge of your customers by appending relevant data about them, often from third-party sources.
To give an example, let’s assume your customer database contains basic customer details like their name, postal address, and email address. You have the telephone number for some customers, but only a small number of records have this field completed. Using a GDPR-compliant third-party solution, you could enrich data with the telephone numbers where this field is missing, making your database more complete.
The definition of data enrichment is different in the context of data integration, where it’s more about enhancing and augmenting the value of your existing data during the integration process through automated data cleaning, automated calculations, and data transformation.
There are a wide range of different enrichments that can be applied to your data - from making sure all your date formats from your different data sources are all standardized to implementing automated language translation and creating new dimensions from your data.
It’s this second definition that we’ll explore more in this post, looking at how data enrichment can make your existing data more accurate and valuable for analysis and decision-making.
How can data enrichment help marketing teams?
Accurate, consistent, and tailored data is critical for data-driven marketers to make the most effective optimization decisions to boost marketing ROI.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at how enriched data can specifically help marketing teams.
Consistency in currency
A common hurdle that many global marketing teams face is the inconsistency in currencies across various marketing platforms.
Imagine the scenario - you want to quickly analyze your best-performing channels and campaigns, but some platforms measure spend and performance metrics in USD, others in GBP, and others in EUR. This makes it more challenging than it needs to be to draw accurate comparisons and arrive at meaningful insights about performance.
You could attempt to convert and standardize the currencies yourself ahead of your analysis, but not only is this time-consuming - it can also be inaccurate, as currency exchange rates are notoriously volatile, fluctuating daily.
To help ensure the quality and accuracy of your data, leading data integration tools can automatically convert currencies based on the latest exchange rates, ensuring consistency across all your marketing channel data, simplifying comparisons, and reflecting the true performance and marketing ROI of your campaigns.
Standardization of language
For global businesses, it’s common to have data being loaded into your data destination from different regions in various languages, leading to confusion and misinterpretation by centralized marketing teams.
It's not necessarily feasible to insist that all global teams operate in a single language, as it's important that employees in each local office and agencies in each country are able to work in the language that is most natural, efficient, and effective.
But from a global marketing performance perspective, this approach makes it challenging to fully understand the messaging and intricate details of campaigns in different territories.
This is where the power of a data transformation tool with automated language translation can really help, by automating the process of translating your data into a single, standardized language for centralized analysis at the same time as keeping the source data localized.
This approach enables centralized global marketing teams to make direct comparisons using enriched data, avoiding the risk of misinterpretation due to language differences.
Join different data sources
Another data enrichment found in leading data integration platforms is the ability to seamlessly join different data sources, which can provide a whole new dimension to how you understand and analyze your marketing data.
Imagine you have a granular approach to your cross-channel online marketing, where you promote each of your most profitable SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) or services to a different target audience.
As long as you have a unique identifier (such as the SKU or service ID) in the campaign name or ad group name, advanced data enrichment can join the data from all the different sources where this unique identifier appears.
The result? A comprehensive SKU-level or service-level marketing report that provides a clear and accurate representation of performance and marketing ROI across all your different channels.
The ability to join datastreams from unique identifiers can give marketers a whole new perspective on the way marketing data is analyzed for campaign optimizations and strategic decision-making.
Add dimensions to data
Some data transformation tools also enable marketing teams to add new dimensions to data using delimiters in text fields, which can empower easy filtering and deeper analysis of marketing data.
Let’s assume that as part of your data governance strategy, it’s been agreed that campaign names will be structured in the following way:
Channel - Country - Category - SKU
With the right data integration platform, using the hyphen as a delimiter can transform a simple text field into a rich, multi-dimensional data point, with each part of the campaign name becoming a filterable element.
This opens up a whole new range of possibilities for marketing data analysis.
For example, you could filter data to compare the performance of different categories across countries or analyze how a particular SKU is performing in various markets.
By adding these additional dimensions with enriched data, marketers can reveal trends and insights that would otherwise be hidden in a less structured dataset.
Improve data quality
Data enrichment is also important for improving data quality, which refers to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, and relevance of your business data.
The quality of your data is the foundation of accurate analysis and is key to helping ensure that teams across your organization trust your data for making important decisions.
By choosing a data integration platform with strong data enrichment capabilities, you can ensure that all your data adheres to agreed formats and standards. This is essential for maintaining consistency across your data and enabling accurate comparison and analysis.
The data enrichment process can also help identify and correct any erroneous data that might be present in your source data. Automated data cleaning and the consolidation of any duplicate records can help maintain the accuracy, reliability, and integrity of your single source of truth.
Better decision-making and stronger marketing ROI
Another powerful application of data enrichment is tailoring data to the specific needs of your business.
While most data integration solutions offer standard, ready-to-use enrichments, some leading platforms have the ability for data teams to create custom enrichments, allowing businesses to refine their data in ways that precisely align with their unique marketing goals and strategies.
Tailored data that perfectly aligns with your marketing objectives can lead to more proactive, insightful, and actionable analysis, giving your business a competitive edge and boosting your marketing ROI.
By leveraging automated data integration and enrichment, Digital Matter gained clearer insights for their cross-channel marketing campaigns., which not only improved their reporting process but also enhanced client relationships and marketing ROI.
Ready to enhance and unlock the power of your data?
In today's data-driven world, understanding and managing your data effectively is crucial for effective decision-making.
Consolidating your data into a centralized database is often a significant step forward for any business looking to break down data silos for more insightful analysis.
But to truly harness the full potential of your data, it needs to be structured, enhanced, and enriched in a way that aligns with your specific business needs.
This is where the power of a data integration platform with robust data enrichment capabilities becomes important, ensuring the quality of your data and enhancing its value for faster, more effective insights and decision-making.
Adverity offers all the data enrichment functionality you need to transform your data into a strategic asset, giving you complete confidence in data quality and unlocking fresh insights that can help you improve marketing ROI.
To experience how Adverity can help you take your data to the next level, book a demo.
