Poor data quality is one of the most ubiquitous problems for B2B marketers with 25 percent of the average B2B marketer’s database deemed inaccurate and 60 per cent of companies struggling with overall data health that is “unreliable.”
Integrate, an Arizona-based supplier of demand generation tools, reviewed 775,000 leads generated for B2B marketers in the technology industry. It found that 60 percent of the total leads generated were deemed good while 40 percent failed because of missing fields, duplicate data, invalid email addresses and other incomplete information. A 40 percent fail rate on prospect data quality should not be the norm, and is considered a “silent killer” of marketing campaigns, the Integrate report states.
“Garbage data seems to be the ‘cigarette smoke’ of the marketing community. Everyone knows it exists, we know it will kill you, but we keep doing the same bad practices and attempting to solve this huge problem with small strokes,” states Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, in the report.
The study finds that poor-quality data effects small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprise and media companies alike with 38 per cent of SMB leads, 39 per cent of enterprise leads and 41 per cent of media company produced leads not reaching their intended target.
“The issue of data quality continues to be one of the biggest roadblocks to effectively analyzing the prospect and customer journey. It also dramatically increases the costs of analytics projects and negatively impacts performance,” Sameer Khan, senior product marketing manager and IBM customer analytics, states in the report.
“Data is the oil of any marketing engine, and in order to create perpetual demand generation, data accuracy needs to be a top priority,” adds Jonathan Burg, senior director of marketing and customer acquisition with Apperian. “Marketers must be ruthless and deliberate about data quality and standardization at point of entry.”
