Organizations are constantly being informed by data, and as they continue to progress and innovate, there’s a real need to manage more massive volumes of data, especially within the marketing and advertising technology space. Data is crucial for many reasons. It influences the efficiency, profitability, and longevity of your enterprise, and it brings clarity via analytics and insights to return on investments to many channels and helps find efficiencies. When data is being leveraged correctly, you can expect returns on investment of ~30%, according to Accenture, but that is more likely when data integrity is being implemented.

So what exactly is data integrity and how can you implement it into your organization’s strategy? Data integrity is a holistic concept consisting of data integration, data quality, data enrichment, and location intelligence. Data integrity ensures the value, usability, accuracy, and consistency of an organization’s data from its creation and analysis all the way to its archival in storage. 

Why is data integrity important?

Data-driven organizations recognize customer data as an essential asset that can have a significant impact on their bottom line by saving the organization time and energy with marketing efforts. As a result, brands are pursuing data democratization and other initiatives to ensure users across the organization (marketing, sales, service, etc.) have easy access to data to perform their job responsibilities quickly and most efficiently. Unless data is high-quality and trustworthy, there’s often little value in it and it quickly becomes a liability for organizations due to the rise of cyber security, duplication, and inaccurate sources to base financial decisions on. 

In addition to supporting informed decision-making, data integrity protects your data subjects’ information. For example, you may collect your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), such as name, social security number, address, and other sensitive information. If an error is made, whether an accidental typo or a hacking attempt, your customers’ information could end up in the wrong hands. This can apply to first-party data, which is information obtained from tracking your users’ actions. Although not all information is equally sensitive, any errors can impact how users are viewed. Data integrity helps protect sensitive information due to how it is stored and safeguarded. When there’s limited duplication and a seamsless data democratization, it mitigates risk as a liability. One of the many benefits data integrity brings to an organization is competitive advantage. 

The Competitive Advantage

Departments depend on reliable data to drive revenue. The ability to engage prospects with the right message at the right time is more important than ever in digital marketing and advertising. This most successfully achieved by leveraging marketing data, first-party data, and other information to target ideal prospects and build relationships with existing customers.

But without data integrity, marketing and ad operations can’t trust they’re getting a full 360-view of the customer to promote the most relevant information.

Here are some practical examples of the competitive advantage data integrity brings: 

• When data integrity is correctly implemented, your organization has a foundation for effective marketing taxonomies. This helps when connecting data-driven insights with digital content as a part of the customer journey. 
• Data integrity ensures sales reps can better qualify and score leads as legitimate. Sales reps also depend on marketing taxonomies to support their sales cycles.
• Being able to accurately measure marketing campaign performance means businesses can identify and pursue the activities that have an impact as well as forecast and predict the success of upcoming projects, increasing their overall return on investment.

With data integrity, organizations can leverage first-party data for granular analytics to fuel campaigns that are strongly aligned with audience demographics, actions, and interests. Marketing data standards are the thread holding this ecosystem all together.

Bringing Data Integrity to Your Organization

Data is no longer just an IT issue. Your organizational data’s overall health and integrity have an enormous impact on the enterprise. Marketing performance, analytics, and compliance are just three examples. Ensuring data integrity is imperative to avoid the costly, far-reaching consequences of inaccurate data. Consider solutions that can enhance your data integrity efforts.

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