Data and Marketing – Getting Started

Data is a big challenge for marketers and business leaders alike.

• Dirty data: 45% of marketers say making sense of inaccurate and inconsistent data is one of their top three-time wasters. State of Branding Report, 2021
• Under-utilised data: 52% of businesses who handle digitalised data don’t analyse it for new insights and knowledge. UK Business Data Survey, 2024
• Fragmented data: 69% of marketers aren’t fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources. State of Marketing, 2024
• Non-compliant data: 63% of UK companies aren’t confident in their data compliance. Usercentrics, 2025
• Insufficient data: 90% of leaders don’t have sufficient data and insights to support growth decisions. McKinsey, 2024

Addressing data challenges as marketers

To be good marketers, we need to be able to tell good stories. To tell those stories we need to get the data right, especially if we want to make the most of AI and emerging tech.

Three of the big benefits of addressing data are:

• Clarity of insight: Avoid wasted resources and costs or damage to the customer experience.
• Greater confidence: Build trust in data and subsequent analysis to support decision making.
• Enhanced credibility: Be able to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and retain or increase marketing budget.

The Experian Global Data Management Report, 2022 found 42% of data practitioners and business leaders attribute bad data to wasted resources and additional costs, and 39% report negative affects to the customer experience. In addition, 38% said bad data had caused damage to the reliability of and trust in analytics.

The 2024 Gartner CMO Spend Survey found that 60% of marketing leaders are unable to demonstrate ROI from their data and analytics; the leaders of these businesses are 2.4 times more likely to reduce or plan to reduce budgets.

Where to start with marketing data

To get your marketing data clean, connected, sustained, legit and optimised, the DIKW hierarchy model is a great tool as it helps you to assess the questions your data is helping you to answer.

As a first step however, I recommend doing an audit of what questions you need to answer and what data you’re currently collecting at each stage of the customer journey.

You can download Glew’s free templates below to complete the audit as follows:

1. Marketing data audit

• Note the KPIs/ metrics that you’re being asked to report against at each stage of the customer journey, whether that’s brand awareness, social media engagement, conversions, churn rates etc. These are the questions your data needs to address.
• Record what data you have to answer these questions and what is missing to enable you to answer those questions.
• Identify which customer touchpoints are generating or could help generate this data, and which teams are responsible for collecting, processing, applying or incorporating it.

This is a powerful tool for demonstrating the overlap between different teams and business functions and keeping the focus on the customer.

2. Marketing data roadmap

• Write a summary of your current marketing data in the left column and a summary of the desired future situation in the right column.
• Map the data points from 1. at the relevant stage of the hierarchy for each part of the customer journey. You may find you’re doing better at utilising data at the engagement stage than you are at the retention stage.

This exercise will give you the start of a roadmap for developing your marketing data.

Below are some tips for addressing each of the key marketing data challenges outlined above:

How to clean dirty data

1. Standardise: Review and reduce variations in your data capture.
2. De-dupe: Find and merge duplicate records – use Excel/ CRM.
3. Remove: Delete or archive outdated or non-compliant data.
4. Validate: Set up validation rules or dropdowns to ensure consistency.
5. Review: Schedule regular checkpoints to review data.

How to connect fragmented data

2. Consult: Speak to people about what they need data to do.
3. Centralise: Look at ways to unify channel, market and CRM data.
4. Collaborate: Communicate about data across teams.
5. Systematise: Ensure taxonomy/ field names are consistent across your different systems.
6. Integrate: Look at ways to sync data for a fuller picture.

How to build on insufficient data

2. Fill gaps: Explore tools to fill or analyse behavioural and attitudinal data.
3. Boost literacy: Understand how to speak data and guide others to interpret it.
4. Build: Develop first-party data on your key audiences.
5. Utilise: Free and open-source data to enrich your own.
6. Prioritise: Metrics that directly inform decisions.

 

How to get your data compliant

1. Legalise: Keep up to data with changes in GDPR and PECR.
2. Track: Make sure consent is clear, granular and documented.
3. Rationalise: Know what you’re collecting and why (refer to ICO).
4. Empower: Give people options to edit their comms/ user preferences.
5. Prepare: Be ready to respond to subject access requests.

 

How to optimise under-utilised data

1. Shift: From passive to active, strategic data collection.
2. Focus: On how people need to use the data.
3. Champion: Data-driven marketing decisions and approaches.
4. Visualise: Make it easy for people to interpret data.
5. Align: Use full-funnel dashboards to show cross-team contributions.

If you’d like guidance more specific to your business or organisation, please book a free half hour call with me.

 

Download the Marketing Data Audit & Roadmap templates

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