Anyone who has ever built a data-driven marketing program knows that you’re likely to encounter small challenges, but if left unaddressed, these challenges can bloom into massive problems down the road. These challenges pop up even more frequently as more and more businesses aim to become fully data-enabled. With this in mind, I have a recent example you may find helpful as you navigate the waters of data-driven operations.

I once managed webinars for a tech company right at the time when events were pivoting to virtual en masse as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The webinars would replace in-person events as our main source of new leads. They were a convenient, safe way for us to engage our prospects and our greater network. But, we quickly ran into a problem when we tried to scale our engagement.

To increase our potential audience and promotion reach, we began advertising and encouraging people to sign up on channels other than our direct webinar landing page (such as LinkedIn). This dramatically increased our awareness and audience. 

But, for those channels, we were only able to extract each attendees’ name and email addresses tied to their account. Unfortunately, these addresses would often be personal emails rather than business emails, and the information on their accounts was outdated or extremely sparse. 

This wasn’t an issue when we only needed to host 10 people per webinar, but became very arduous and surprisingly time-consuming once we grew the webinar series. Additionally, LinkedIn didn’t provide more than names and emails tied to each account, which required us to find job titles, companies, etc. on our own.

Manually consolidating, enriching, updating, and contextualizing each record quickly became a huge resource drain for our team. We couldn’t revert back to limiting sign-ups as we had in the pre-COVID era, but we also could not afford to spend so much time and effort reconciling the data. We kept going in circles on how to address this issue, and never ended up with a true, 100% solution.

Enlisting Help

Looking back now, we needed help to take all the people data from different sources, update, standardize, and enrich them, so we could focus more on our business and marketing efforts. At the time, tools for this were just beginning to emerge, and we still expected to do most of the data work ourselves.

This may sound hauntingly similar to a situation you may be in today: lots of data but no idea how to make it actionable ASAP, or not enough data in too many different silos. The task of managing this data has the ability to drown your company, but it also has the potential to launch your business past the competition. 

My advice: find a data partner that can provide a single source of truth for data by ensuring all your records are accurate and enriched with all the information you need, and updated consistently to avoid data decay. By the way, Gartner reports that globally every month around 3% of data decays (36% annually). 

People Data Labs has created a Person Enrichment API that would have literally saved the marketing department described in my example above, and has helped many of our customers catalyze their business. Rather than me harp about it, watch this short video below for a snapshot on how it works, and/or chat with us today to strategize your data-driven operations.

Like what you read? Scroll down and subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly updates with our latest content.