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.
25 steps to better data
Below are some tips for addressing each of the key marketing data challenges outlined above:
How to clean dirty data
- Standardise: Review and reduce variations in your data capture.
- De-dupe: Find and merge duplicate records using Excel or your CRM.
- Remove: Delete or archive outdated or non-compliant data.
- Validate: Set up validation rules or dropdowns to ensure consistency.
- Review: Schedule regular checkpoints to review data.
How to connect fragmented data
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- Consult: Speak to people about what they need data to do.
- Centralise: Look at ways to unify channel, market and CRM data.
- Collaborate: Communicate about data across teams.
- Systematise: Ensure taxonomy/ field names are consistent across your different systems.
- Integrate: Look at ways to sync data for a fuller picture.
How to build on insufficient data
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- Fill gaps: Explore tools to fill or analyse behavioural and attitudinal data.
- Boost literacy: Understand how to speak data and guide others to interpret it.
- Build: Develop first-party data on your key audiences.
- Utilise: Free and open-source data to enrich your own.
- Prioritise: Metrics that directly inform decisions.
How to get your data compliant
- Legalise: Keep up to data with changes in GDPR and PECR.
- Track: Make sure consent is clear, granular and documented.
- Rationalise: Know what you’re collecting and why (refer to ICO).
- Empower: Give people options to edit their comms/ user preferences.
- Prepare: Be ready to respond to subject access requests.
How to optimise under-utilised data
- Shift: From passive to active, strategic data collection.
- Focus: On how people need to use the data.
- Champion: Data-driven marketing decisions and approaches.
- Visualise: Make it easy for people to interpret data.
- 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.