Your ability to reach people in the moment is dependent on data quality. Learn why clean, accurate data is so important for real-time connections.
Key Takeaways
- Real time targeting helps marketers deliver personalized experiences, which today’s customers want
- Consumer data must be clean to deliver these in-the-moment results
- Focusing on data quality considerations like data source and eliminating silos improves real time targeting
- BDEX has the right data quality solutions for your brand
Today’s digital marketers are always striving to reach consumers in the moment with relevant content that excites and inspires them. This requires the right balance of data collection and real time targeting to forge meaningful connections with the right people.
However, only 7% of marketers are able to deliver real time engagements driven by data, and just 5% can identify how these engagements impact their bottom line. A big part of these issues is that data systems aren’t where they should be. They may be fragmented, and thus the data is not complete, accurate, or up to date.
This is why a greater focus on data quality must be at the foundation of any targeting strategy. In this post, we will walk through how real time targeting works and how to improve the way you ensure data is clean.
How does real-time targeting work?
It’s helpful to discuss why real-time targeting is important in the first place. Customers in today’s largely digital marketplace appreciate timely, personalized experiences from brands. When a brand can set itself apart from competitors by creating these experiences, they are more likely to build brand awareness, generate new leads, grow their base of repeat customers, and increase sales.
Consumers receive messages of all kinds on their social media platforms, in their email inboxes, and now even in the form of text messages. They are on guard against spam and suspicious of ways companies try to trick them with dishonest tactics. If a company sounds too salesy or clearly has not put thought into who they’re talking to, customers will respond negatively.
Real-time targeting helps marketers create content that is tailored to what customers really want to see. It accounts for what they’re seeking in the moment and provides relevant, timely experiences and messaging that feel more personalized. These needs are why the ability to deliver real-time customer interactions across their devices and touchpoints was predicted to increase to 79% in 2020, up from 60% in 2018.
To make real-time targeting happen, brands need to know their audiences. And that means knowing about the people behind the data, not just viewing human beings as numbers. This is accomplished by gathering the right data, knowing how to use it, and thinking about what it says about the customer in any given moment.
Brands must be able to act on these insights immediately with the right data solutions. For example, taking an approach that reaches across customers’ devices allows brands to get a better picture of overall behavior. If a consumer starts looking for a product on their laptop, then searches again on their mobile device, identifying those interactions across their devices leads to better real-time targeting. You can reach them right when they’re ready to make a decision. What could be more personal than that?
How to make sure your data is clean
All of these real-time connections are impossible without the right data. You must first remember the six characteristics of data quality:
- Accuracy
- Completeness
- Reliability
- Timeliness
- Relevance
- Availability
When data is accurate, complete, reliable, timely, relevant, and available, it is considered to be clean. It is too easy for data in your systems to become outdated, incomplete, or otherwise inaccurate. Even if you have the wrong email address or digits switched in a phone number, that data is essentially worthless and could lead to wasted time and energy.
Tracking data across a customer’s channels, personalizing your marketing campaigns, and collecting data in real time, all require that the data be clean. Otherwise, your real time targeting efforts will not connect with the right people when you need to reach them most.
Focus on these tactics to ensure your data is clean:
- Implement data quality standards so the data you receive is already clean when you get it (this saves time trying to clean up the data later).
- Create a data quality management team and process.
- Monitor and remove duplicate data from your systems.
- Avoid data silos where information is being pulled from many different sources and stored in many different locations.
- Educate your teams about data quality and best practices.
- Clean the existing data you do have.
- Use the right data source that shows a commitment to data quality.
Once you have high-quality data, you can better understand your customers and reach them in crucial moments. This ability opens you up for making more personalized, meaningful, real time connections.
Why BDEX is your reliable data source
Where you get your data matters. You need a source that has processes in place to clean data and filter out bad data, integrates automation and machine learning, and always prioritizes data quality in its systems and practices.
BDEX focuses on data quality, so you can trust where your information is coming from. The BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) has more user data than any other platform. Using BDEX’s data solutions, you can view real time customer data and customer profiles to understand each person’s interests and behaviors before you target them.
BDEX puts the right people in front of you at the right moment so you can deliver better experiences. Connect with your customers like never before when taking advantage of our data solutions.
Contact BDEX to learn more about our data platform and solutions like Omnisource IQ, the BDEX identity graph, and our Data as a Service (DaaS) approach.
