26 Dec 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

The quality of a marketer's data is just as important as the quantity of it in order for them to make informed, strategic decisions.

Did you know that there are actually several types of data? Not all data is created equal.

Clean data that is accurate, complete, and consistent. This data is up-to-date, which is essential for driving marketing success.

Your junk emails, cache data, and junk messages are all those data you don't need anymore. Cleaning unwanted data once in a while is going to help a lot in handling your business very efficiently. It contributes toward achieving better results and helps make sure that your data remains clean and effective.

What is Data Cleaning?

Data cleaning, also known as data cleansing or data scrubbing, is the process of correcting or removing incorrect, redundant, incomplete, improperly formatted, or corrupted data from a dataset. Though it may include the deletion of some data, the purpose is to get the dataset as accurate and reliable as possible.

This might have correction of spelling errors, detection of duplicates and removal, correcting such errors as mislabeled or empty fields, as well as ensuring data was inputted consistently or else from multiple sources.

Why Is Data Cleaning Important?

Data cleaning is important in ensuring that your data has the highest quality. Error-free data prevents mistakes; there is less frustration with both customers and employees; this also increases productivity.

Analysis and decision-making data can also be improved. Without cleaning your data first, it's going to be messy, incomplete, or inaccurate, which makes data analysis harder, less clear, and less reliable.

Consequently, the decisions you make based on that data could also be flawed. Now that we know what data cleaning is and why it matters, let's look at some of the steps and methods used to clean data.

Why do we need to clean data in B2B Marketing?

In B2B marketing, data drives the decision. Marketers rely on data to know the below things:

• Who are their prospects?
• How to segment their prospects?
• How to optimise their campaigns and monitor their performance.

Clean data is the basis for all these.

1. Segmentation for better targeting:

B2B marketing works only when proper knowledge is gained about your audience. Only clean data would allow such knowledge. This is why B2B marketers find one of the strongest tools within segmentation: using segmentation allows businesses to market the appropriate messaging, content, and offers to the right prospects.

With clean and accurate data, marketers can segment the audience by demographics, firmographics, and behaviour. With poor data, all of your efforts will be misdirected, or even worse, it might lead you to the wrong audience, missing out on the potential lead.

2. Personalization:

Modern B2B marketing cannot function without personalization. The delivery of content that speaks to the specific needs, preferences, and behaviours of individual prospects can increase engagement and conversion rates.

Clean data allows for personalized marketing by giving you insights about what the customer preferences are and their past interactions.

For example, if a company's CRM is full of outdated or incorrect contact information, then personalized email campaigns may miss the right people or fail to be relevant to them.

All of these are interconnected with each other. You need to make sure to clear out your data once in a while for a smooth experience.

Read Also: Increase Your Sales Revenue and Profitability through CRM Best Practices

3. Optimize your Marketing Campaigns:

Without testing and optimization, you can't run an effective marketing campaign. Clean data can help marketing teams analyze and track campaign performance accurately. This is applicable to email marketing, pay-per-click ads, and also social media campaigns. Just remember that the quality of your data directly impacts how well you can measure success.

With clean data, marketers may track open rates, click-through rates, and also the number of converted users. Therefore, knowing these insights promotes better decision-making and continuous improvements. False data can render wrong reports, hence strategizing wrongly and never knowing when to opt for better execution.

4. Better rapport with your customer:

B2B marketing is the acquisition of new customers. If you want a long-term relationship with present customers, clean data is your life savior for these relationships to last. Companies can talk to their clients meaningfully with proper information on contact, communication, and other customer histories.

For instance, if a marketer does not have up-to-date customer preferences, he or she might unintentionally send irrelevant offers. This can lead to disengagement or even to customer churn. Clean data ensures that communications are properly aligned with the current state of the customer journey; thus, relationships are strong and loyalty is assured.

5. Align your Sales and Marketing:

Sales and marketing teams heavily depend on clean data to collaborate effectively. In most B2B organizations, marketing is responsible for lead generation. The sales team on the other hand is responsible for converting them. Clean and accurate data helps both teams be on the same page. When marketing shares data with the sales team, it should be reliable and actionable.

With clean data, salespeople can only focus on leads that are probably going to convert, whereas marketing can track how well a campaign is driving quality leads.

A seamless flow of clean data ensures that all teams work towards shared goals, reducing friction and increasing overall performance.

6. Increase Marketing ROI:

Clean data helps businesses spend their marketing budget better. It leads to better targeting, improved customer experiences, and optimized campaigns, all of which contribute to a better return on investment (ROI). Businesses can reallocate resources toward high-performing activities by eliminating wasteful marketing spend on irrelevant audiences.

7. Compliance and Legal Issues:

Since the need for data protection has gained importance, data accuracy has become a critical measure toward meeting the requirements of such legislation as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA). These have now necessitated that businesses work towards ensuring personal data with more accountability and transparency.

Outdated or incorrect data may breach compliance regulations, which will incur fines, lawsuits, and even damage to your brand reputation. Keeping your data clean helps ensure that your business is following legal requirements and also protects your customers and organization.

What are the steps to Clean Data in B2B Marketing?

Now that we know the importance of having good data, the subsequent concern would be: How are you going to clean your data?

The following are the best practices for keeping quality data in B2B marketing:

1. Regular Data Cleaning:

Data cleaning should be a continuous process. Just like how machines are to be maintained on a consistent basis, you should be able to audit and cleanse your data regularly. This is to identify and throw out duplicates that might have occurred without your knowledge, and outdated information.

The missing data and inaccurate entries that might have passed from your eye level are also to be noticed. You can use data cleaning tools or try them out manually yourself to make sure your data stays in place with up-to-date information.

2. Combine Data Sources:

In B2B marketing, data normally originates from various sources:

• CRM systems
• Email platforms
• Social media channels
• Website analytics

If you combine all these systems into one the data will smoothly flow from one to the other. It would remove unnecessary information so that each platform has the same updated data. For marketers, the workload to be taken off like that would be very helpful.

Read Also: Top 7 Email Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Sales

3. Standardize Data Entry Process:

To avoid errors and inconsistencies in your data just implement standardized processes for data entry. This includes setting clear guidelines for how customer information should be input, formatted, and categorized.

The best example for this would be using dropdown menus for selecting specific values (like company size or industry), which can reduce human error and ensure uniformity across your database.

4. Recognize your Data by using the proper tools:

Many marketing automation platforms and CRMs provide some form of data validation capabilities. They can automatically tag duplicate records, missing fields, and incorrect formatting; thus, maintaining clean data is much easier.

Data can also be entered the right way in real-time, thus preventing errors that might find their way into your system.

5. Leverage Third-Party Data Providers:

For many B2B marketers, it is hard to collect and maintain accurate data. Third-party data providers can help fill the gaps and provide additional insights about prospects and customers.

These services can help ensure that your data is complete and accurate, especially when it comes to firmographic details such as company size, revenue, and industry.

6. Focus on Data Security:

Apart from ensuring that your data is correct, it must also be secure. Incorporate robust data protection policies that would prevent unauthorized access, theft, or even loss of critical customer information.

A secure data infrastructure will protect your business as well as instill confidence in your customers when they see that you really value their privacy.

7. Remain Consistent in the Development of Data:

Data enrichment is essentially the process of enriching your existing data by either supplementing it with other information from customer surveys or third-party sources. Through continuous enrichment, you will be able to know your customers better, hence enhancing your marketing approach with time.

For example, you can collect information about prospects' problems or challenges, goals, or purchase behavior, hence more targeted and personalized campaigns.

Read Also: How Digital Marketing Thrives with Data Analytics

Tools and Technologies you can use for Data Cleaning:

Several tools and technologies exist to make B2B marketers clean, maintain, and have accurate updated data. Not only will these tools simplify the data cleaning process, but they also improve data quality in general.

This means that whatever information marketers rely on making strategic decisions will be of a much better quality.

HubSpot:

HubSpot is one of the most popular platforms in terms of CRM and marketing automation. The platform comes with a pro suite of data management features that will help companies maintain their data organized and clean.

The CRM on HubSpot enables users to manage contacts by very detailed criteria, monitor customer behaviors, and provide insights about real-time customer interactions.

With HubSpot, marketers can automate tasks such as data entry and cleaning. This reduces your tedious task of manually putting in effort and ensures that the data used for campaigns is always up-to-date and actionable. HubSpot also allows smooth integration with other tools that will create the same set of data across all the tools you will use.

Clearbit:

Clearbit is a potent data enrichment tool, enhancing the business lead and customer data of companies. They collect information about the firmographics such as company size, industry, and role.

It would enable B2B marketers to create more detailed customer profiles that enhance segmentation and targeting efforts. Clearbit also supports real-time validation of data.

When segmentation is done right, you will have a smooth experience of collecting data. This allows you to validate whether email addresses and other contact information you're using are accurate and deliverable.

Clearbit enriches your data by bringing in external sources to ensure that your marketing messages are being delivered to the right people, therefore increasing the chance of high-quality leads.

Datanyze:

Datanyze is another type of data enrichment tool but with a focus on prospect and company data insights. It helps B2B marketers gather valuable information regarding prospects' technologies, industries, company sizes, and growth stages.

With Datanyze, businesses can clean and validate data used for lead generation and outreach campaigns. Also, this tool provides thorough data analytics that helps the marketing teams prioritize high-value leads and improve their outreach strategies, ensuring that all marketing efforts are more targeted and efficient.

ZoomInfo:

ZoomInfo is a leading B2B data provider, giving access to a vast business contact database and companies.

It helps companies maintain the most accurate and updated information about prospects to make sure the marketing efforts focus on the right people at the right companies.

ZoomInfo provides access to firmographic and technographic data, which includes job titles, company size, revenue, and much more, in order to help marketers improve segmentation and targeting. With clean data through ZoomInfo, your outreach campaigns are always targeting the most relevant and qualified leads.

ZeroBounce:

ZeroBounce verifies email addresses for cleansing and validation of email lists that ensure that email marketers reach their targeted recipients through the service.

ZeroBounce is meant to clear out all invalid, disposable, or low-quality e-mail addresses to avoid increased bounce rates, improve delivery, and prevent sender damage.

The additional services involved in this platform include detecting spam traps and scoring, which gives a high-performance campaign and good quality leads.

With these tools, B2B marketers can guarantee that their data will be accurate, clean, and ready for use to create effective marketing strategies.

These technologies streamline the cleaning of data while also improving targeting, personalization, and campaign performance. With these tools around the corner, you can easily deal with the tedious task of cleaning your data.

So get started with the data cleaning; connect with us at info@ontogendigital.com to avail our services. We offer a variety of services, including social media marketing, website development, video editing, and content writing. Subscribe to our blogs for more such information.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Importance of Clean Data: Clean, accurate, and up-to-date data is essential for driving successful B2B marketing strategies, enhancing targeting, and optimizing campaigns.
Enhanced Personalization: Clean data enables marketers to deliver highly personalized content, improving engagement and conversion rates.
Segmentation and Targeting: Clean data supports precise audience segmentation by demographics, behavior, and firmographics, ensuring that marketing efforts reach the right people.
Improved Campaign ROI: Accurate data helps eliminate wasteful spending on irrelevant audiences, leading to better returns on marketing investments.
Legal Compliance: Maintaining clean data helps businesses adhere to data protection regulations and avoid fines or reputational damage.

FAQs

Q1: What is data cleaning?
A: Data cleaning, also called data scrubbing, is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, duplicate, incomplete, or improperly formatted data to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Q2: Why is data cleaning important in B2B marketing?
A: Clean data improves targeting, personalization, and campaign performance while reducing errors, saving resources, and enhancing decision-making.

Q3: How does clean data improve audience segmentation?
A: Clean data allows marketers to segment audiences based on accurate demographics, firmographics, and behaviors, ensuring more effective and relevant targeting.

Q4: Which tools are best for maintaining clean data?
A: Popular tools include HubSpot for CRM and marketing automation, Clearbit for data enrichment, Datanyze for prospect insights, ZoomInfo for up-to-date contact information, and ZeroBounce for email validation.

Q5: What are some steps to clean data?
A: Regular audits, combining data sources, standardizing data entry processes, using automated validation tools, and leveraging third-party providers are effective steps for cleaning data.

Q6: How does clean data align sales and marketing teams?
A: Clean data ensures both teams have accurate, actionable insights, enabling effective collaboration and reducing friction in lead generation and conversion efforts.

Q7: Can clean data help with legal compliance?
A: Yes, clean data ensures adherence to regulations like the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, protecting businesses from fines and reputational damage.