Marketing data management: Benefits and best practices
Effective digital marketing strategies rely on quality data. While collecting and managing data is crucial for developing campaigns that attract and retain customers, it needs to be well organized to be useful. With data coming in from multiple channels and activities, how do you manage it all?
When you ensure your marketing data is protected and can be appropriately accessed, analyzed, and applied throughout your marketing processes, you can create effective campaigns that drive revenue.
This guide explores what marketing data management is, the challenges and benefits of it, and best practices you can follow to manage the data you collect.
What is marketing data management?
Marketing data management is the process of collecting, storing, securing, organizing, and leveraging marketing data to fuel your marketing strategies. An effective data management framework empowers you to achieve business goals and comply with data privacy laws by centralizing and streamlining your data handling practices.
What’s the difference between customer data and marketing data?
Think of marketing data as the broad term for all the information that powers your marketing efforts. It helps you to figure out who your customers are and what they want, enabling you to optimize your campaigns to drive more engagement and increase revenue.
Customer data is a specific type of marketing data. It includes personal information collected from an individual customer either directly or indirectly, such as their name, location, purchasing history, details about affiliate marketing links they click on while reading your content, and browsing behavior.
While marketing data informs overall marketing strategies, customer data helps you tailor and personalize marketing tactics for each individual customer.
Marketing data management challenges
Data is often gathered from multiple sources of varying quality and volume and stored on a number of platforms. This can make it difficult to navigate and organize your data to improve your marketing performance while staying compliant with data privacy laws.
Here are some common challenges with managing marketing data and how to solve them.
Accessing marketing data
Every online interaction — from clicking ads to checking out of your online store — generates data. However, this data is often only accessible to specific teams or team members and can be split across many different platforms, like CRMs and other tools. This can make it more difficult to access data when you need it.
The solution: data integration
Using a consent management platform (CMP), preference management tool, and server-side tagging can help centralize control and access over user data to help you to align your consent and data collection practices with regulatory requirements.
Turning data into insights
Marketing data is invaluable to most modern businesses, but more data doesn’t always mean better insights. Marketing teams traditionally rely heavily on third-party data, which involves huge data sets that aren’t necessarily high quality or well targeted.
The solution: zero-party and first-party data
Collecting zero-party and first-party data provides higher quality insights directly from customers, even though it’s less data to work from. This practice can produce more manageable sets of relevant data, starting with gathering consent for marketing directly from the source — your customers. When customers tell you exactly who they are and what they want, you don’t necessarily need huge amounts of additional data for effective marketing.
Staying privacy-compliant
“Most of the world is now protected by data privacy laws, and that will continue to expand and evolve,” says Usercentrics CMO Adelina Peltea. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) are just a few regulations in the ever-growing list of global data privacy laws.
“Additionally, big tech platforms are creating new requirements for their customers in order to enable their own privacy compliance, which can significantly affect smaller companies’ operations and bottom line,” Peltea continues. It’s essential to stay compliant with these regulations when managing marketing and consent data.
The solution: specialized tools
While there are similarities among privacy laws, each has its own nuances and intricacies that marketing teams need to pay close attention to. This can become complex, and using a CMP with a robust consent management API can help you stay compliant and tailor your privacy notices to your customers’ locations.
“Companies need to leverage legal and privacy resources to understand their responsibilities, and use comprehensive tools to meet data privacy requirements, like a consent management platform to obtain valid user consent on websites and apps, and Google Consent Mode integration to signal consent information to Google services.” — Adelina Peltea, CMO of Usercentrics
Benefits of comprehensive data management in marketing
An effective marketing data management strategy makes it easier to access and interpret information to optimize your marketing efforts and improve privacy compliance.
Improved customer insights
A robust marketing data management solution involves centralizing customer data to create a single source of information that your marketing team can control and analyze when developing strategies or reviewing activities.
You also need accurate data to understand your target audience and optimize your campaigns, set clear goals for improving operations, and implement privacy-led solutions to build customer trust.
Improved personalization
Personalization is key to high-performing marketing campaigns, as customers expect content to align with their needs.
Obtain explicit consent and use data about preferences and interactions using a tool like the Usercentrics Preference Manager to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with your audience and drive quality leads.
Better assess campaign performance
Track the customer journey and leverage data analytics and reporting to effectively assess your marketing efforts and opt-in rates. These tools can help you spot trends and correlations to identify potential performance improvements.
Improve existing campaigns
A data management system that synchronizes data collected from other tools in your tech stack gives you the ability to access and analyze your data to quickly update your existing marketing campaigns. It also helps you confirm that you’ve obtained the consent you need to roll out these marketing activities.
With higher quality data that is organized and legally compliant, you can analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns, test various scenarios, and make adjustments to improve performance.
Focusing on data privacy as part of your marketing data management structure builds customer loyalty and trust, which means customers are more likely to provide more data and feedback on new strategies and new marketing activities as you test them. This can help identify and take advantage of emerging patterns to drive even better results.
Lead nurturing
Understanding your audience, personalizing interactions, and optimizing your data management processes and marketing campaigns help you to better nurture leads throughout the sales funnel to conversion.
Segmenting leads based on demographic data, tailoring messages, and mapping user journeys are some ways to do this. Retargeting is another essential technique. It’s one of the lowest cost ways to recapture interest and maintain relationships with customers.
However, you need to ensure that it’s done correctly to ensure that your marketing efforts align with user policies that are in place as a result of the DMA, as well as other regulations.
Accurately calculate return on investment
An effective marketing data management strategy enables you to integrate data from multiple platforms to pinpoint which actions or campaigns contributed to driving a sale.
This can help you to better understand which channels drive the greatest return on investment (ROI) so you can allocate your budget effectively.
Enhanced security
Data protection regulations such as the GDPR require that personal information must be securely stored and handled to protect it against loss, theft, destruction, or damage, as well as unauthorized or unlawful processing by third parties. Noncompliance puts your business at risk of fines and other serious penalties.
A data breach can also severely damage your business’s reputation. This decreases customer trust, which can have a long-term effect on your bottom line.
“With a larger digital ecosystem and interconnected platforms, in addition to larger amounts of data, security remains paramount for companies’ reputations, users’ trust, regulatory compliance, and financial stability. Companies need to invest in and maintain best practices like access control, encryption, and enacting comprehensive data processing agreements with third parties,” explains Peltea.
5 best practices for the marketing data management process
It can be difficult knowing where to start with your data management strategy. Adhering to marketing data management best practices enables you to optimize your marketing efforts to drive impact with your audience. Try these five practices to streamline your data processes and drive efficient and effective strategic decisions.
1. Use data integration
Data integration involves merging information from multiple channels. This simplifies data management and improves accuracy for better decision-making.
It can also help you create a seamless customer experience. When your data sources are aligned, you can more easily analyze it to provide only the most relevant and engaging marketing content to your audience.
2. Ensure data security
Securing customer data is crucial to helping your organization achieve compliance with data privacy laws and safeguard your brand reputation.
Reliable data enables marketers to develop and execute targeted and effective strategies. However, failing to adequately secure this data can have significant consequences. Data breaches can damage your brand’s reputation and lead to hefty fines and onerous ongoing requirements, like audits. They might also scare away customers, partners, and investors.
Robust data security measures help to maintain the integrity of your brand, build customer trust, and mitigate noncompliance risks.
3. Focus on data quality
High quality data is more complete, accurate, and actionable. You’re more likely to obtain this with zero-party and first-party data. Use it to draw reliable insights and precisely target customers with tailored campaigns.
Ensuring data integrity and regularly controlling data for quality can eliminate duplication errors and incomplete or outdated data. This involves performing regular audits, cleansing data to correct or remove inaccuracies, and adhering to robust data governance practices.
4. Analyze data and make use of insights
Collecting and storing data for its own sake is pointless. Marketers need to analyze data to unlock patterns and trends to inform strategic decisions.
“Raw data doesn’t benefit companies. Marketers and other departments need to clearly know what their goals are and how they will measure progress and success, as well as how to optimize operations, improve products and user experiences, and all the other ways data can help companies.
“To do this well, they need skilled and well-trained staff, including data experts, to work with data and help teams crystalize their needs. They also need sophisticated analytics tools to work with the data and present it in user-friendly and useful ways.” — Adelina Peltea, CMO of Usercentrics
When preparing data for analysis, it’s important to implement responsible data handling practices. Incorporate fit-for-purpose data handling tools into your data management strategy.
For example, using a CMP and implementing Google Consent Mode to control Google services improves data handling while still capturing insights in line with privacy regulations.
5. Communicate data insights
Teams across your business need to be aligned in order to achieve common goals.
Not all teams have access to your marketing data, but it may benefit them. When you share clear, actionable insights, your sales, marketing, product, customer care, and other teams can coordinate their strategies more efficiently. This data-driven, collaborative approach can help achieve business objectives.
Manage marketing data better with Usercentrics
With so many evolving regulations, making the most of the data you collect while maintaining privacy compliance can be a challenge.
Usercentrics provides seamless integrations to streamline data privacy compliance across the platforms, websites, and systems you use. It also helps build user trust by adapting your consent banner, collecting consent information, and monitoring user interaction to optimize opt-in rates.
Our platform helps you achieve and maintain compliance with data privacy laws worldwide by giving users granular control over their consent choices. Plus, it stores consent data securely, giving you more control and protection over users’ personal data. It also enables access to that consent date in the event of an audit or data subject request.
Usercentrics CMP and Preference Manager also work together seamlessly, helping you collect, centralize, and activate zero-party user data, consent, and preferences that you can use to tailor your marketing efforts for a more personalized user experience.
As medical education provider AMBOSS noted, Usercentrics offers considerable benefits: “We were able to streamline our consent management process and lower implementation efforts, thus saving valuable engineering time. Brand trust and reputation, of course, comes with the streamlined processes and compliance.”
When integrated into your marketing data management strategy, Usercentrics CMP and Preference Manager empower your business to unlock the full potential of the consented user data you collect.
Usercentrics does not provide legal advice, and information is provided for educational purposes only. We always recommend engaging qualified legal counsel or privacy specialists regarding data privacy and protection issues and operations.