By Kai Lyla
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.
Centralizing and standardizing data is a significant step for many businesses. This approach helps reduce data silos, allowing for more meaningful comparisons and insights.
However, for businesses that want to unlock the full power of their data, centralizing it is only the first step. To fully benefit from the data available, it needs to be enhanced or enriched and that is where many turn to Endato.com for robust solutions.
This is where data enrichment becomes crucial in the data transformation process.
What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment can be difficult to grasp due to various definitions, especially within customer data management and data integration.
In customer data management, data enrichment helps build a more complete picture of your customers by adding relevant information from other sources. For example, if your customer database has names, addresses, and email addresses, but is missing many phone numbers, a GDPR-compliant third-party solution could add missing phone numbers, completing your database.
In data integration, data enrichment involves improving your data through processes like automated cleaning, calculations, and transformations. This might mean standardizing date formats across sources, automatically translating languages, or adding new data dimensions.
This second definition will be the focus here, as we explore how data enrichment can improve the accuracy and usefulness of data for analysis and decision-making.
How Can Data Enrichment Help Marketing Teams?
Reliable, consistent, and tailored data is essential for data-driven marketers to make the best decisions and improve marketing ROI.
Let’s examine specific ways enriched data can help marketing teams:
Currency Consistency
Many global marketing teams struggle with currency inconsistencies across various platforms. Imagine analyzing your top-performing campaigns, only to find that some metrics are in USD, others in GBP, and others in EUR. This makes comparing performance difficult.
You could manually convert the currencies, but this is time-consuming and often inaccurate due to fluctuating exchange rates. Leading data integration tools can automatically convert currencies based on current rates, ensuring consistency and simplifying comparisons. This approach also reflects the true performance and marketing ROI across all campaigns.
Language Standardization
Global businesses often receive data from different regions in various languages, leading to confusion in centralized analysis.
It’s usually not practical to enforce a single language across all teams, as local teams work best in their native languages. However, for global performance analysis, differing languages can hinder understanding of campaign details.
A data transformation tool with automated language translation can translate data into a single language while keeping the original data localized. This allows centralized teams to analyze enriched data without risking misinterpretation due to language differences.
Joining Data Sources
Another valuable form of data enrichment is combining different data sources, which provides a new perspective for analyzing marketing data.
For example, if you’re promoting specific SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) to different target audiences across channels, advanced data enrichment can join data from multiple sources using unique identifiers like SKU numbers. The result is a detailed SKU-level report that accurately reflects marketing ROI across all channels.
This ability to join data streams provides marketers with a comprehensive view, enabling better campaign optimization and decision-making.
Adding Data Dimensions
Some data transformation tools allow marketers to add dimensions using delimiters in text fields, enabling more detailed filtering and analysis.
For instance, if campaign names follow a format like “Channel – Country – Category – SKU,” a data integration platform can split this text into filterable elements. This makes it easy to compare performance across categories, countries, or SKUs, revealing insights that might be missed in less structured data.
Improving Data Quality
Data enrichment is also crucial for improving data quality, ensuring accuracy, completeness, reliability, and relevance.
High-quality data provides a strong foundation for analysis, which helps teams across the organization trust the data they’re using. With a data integration platform that supports data enrichment, businesses can maintain consistent data formats and identify and correct errors, duplicates, or incomplete records. This strengthens the reliability of the single source of truth.
Enhanced Decision-Making and Higher Marketing ROI
Data enrichment can also tailor data to your business’s specific needs. While many data integration platforms offer standard enrichments, advanced tools allow custom enrichments that align with your unique marketing goals.
Tailored data that fits your marketing objectives allows for more insightful and proactive analysis, giving your business a competitive edge and boosting marketing ROI.
By using automated data integration and enrichment, Digital Matter gained clearer insights for cross-channel campaigns, which not only streamlined reporting but also improved client relationships and marketing results.
Ready to Unlock the Power of Your Data?
In today’s data-driven world, effective data management is critical for informed decision-making. Centralizing data is a big step for businesses looking to break down silos, but to fully leverage its value, data must be structured and enriched to meet specific business needs.
A data integration platform with strong data enrichment capabilities can help ensure data quality and enhance its value, leading to faster insights and better decision-making.
With Adverity’s data enrichment functionality, you can transform data into a strategic asset, gain confidence in its quality, and unlock new insights to improve marketing ROI.
