In the 2024 State of the Marketing Operations Professional report by Datagence and Insentric, one message stands out: data portability is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
The ability to seamlessly move, analyze, and act on data is foundational for businesses navigating today’s complex market. And achieving true data portability requires the harmonious interplay of three pillars: data enrichment, data quality, and data integration.
Together, these elements form the trifecta of data portability and create a robust foundation that drives smarter decisions and better business outcomes.
So, why do these three pillars matter and how do they work together to deliver against the demands of modern marketing and revenue operations?
Data Enrichment: Turning Basic Data into Strategic Assets
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data by adding valuable context (such as job titles, industries, and behaviors) that enables more precise segmentation and targeting. According to the report, data enrichment is the top data priority for 53% of companies over the next year, especially for supporting account-based marketing (ABM) and go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
Why is enrichment so critical?
Basic customer data often falls short in a world where personalized communication is the norm. For example, knowing a prospect’s name and email address is useful, but knowing their job title, company size, and recent buying behaviors transforms that data into actionable intelligence. Enriched data allows marketing teams to create highly personalized campaigns and empowers sales teams with deeper insights into customer needs.
But enrichment should be about adding reliable data that aligns with your business goals, not just getting more information for information’s sake. Investments in enrichment tools are rising steadily, but we believe the enrichment process should be grounded in strong data quality standards to avoid introducing inaccuracies.
Data Quality: The Foundation of Reliable Insights
Clean, accurate, and consistent data is the backbone of every successful marketing and sales strategy. However, the report highlights that data quality remains a formidable challenge for businesses of all sizes. While data quality has been a longstanding focus, today’s interconnected and AI-driven world demands data reliability.
Data quality ensures that information is accurate, complete, and relevant. But data reliability goes further, guaranteeing that data is not only clean but also timely and trustworthy across all applications and teams. According to the report, 47% of companies rank data quality and integrity as a top priority for the coming year.
Why? Because poor data quality can lead to costly mistakes, project delays, and ineffective campaigns.
For example, imagine a sales team relying on outdated lead information during a product launch. They spend hours cold-calling contacts whose details are incorrect or whose roles no longer align with the product being offered. The result? Lost opportunities, wasted resources, and frustrated sales representatives.
On the flip side, reliable data allows sales teams to connect with the right people, at the right time, with messaging that resonates. Reliable data empowers teams to optimize operations and deliver impactful customer experiences.
Data Integration: Breaking Down Silos for a 360-Degree View
In the 2024 report, integration capabilities rank as the top criterion for evaluating new marketing technologies, cited by 81% of participants. There is a growing need for systems that can seamlessly share data across platforms and enable a unified view of the customer journey.
Unfortunately, we have seen many organizations struggle with siloed data stored across CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. These silos make it difficult to generate actionable insights or create cohesive strategies.
Without integration, you’re left manually reconciling spreadsheets (I know you cringed just thinking about spending hours doing that).
Integration ensures that data flows freely between systems, creating a connected data ecosystem. It also allows businesses to scale their operations without sacrificing data reliability. For example, a fully integrated martech stack enables seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams, ensuring everyone works from the same playbook.
The Trifecta: How Enrichment, Quality, and Integration Work Together
While each pillar—enrichment, quality, and integration—is valuable on its own, their real power lies in their interplay. Together, they form the foundation of data portability, allowing businesses to move and act on data with confidence.
Why do these elements need to be intertwined?
- Enrichment without quality introduces errors. Imagine you’re enriching your CRM data by pulling job titles and company details from a third-party provider. On the surface, this seems like a game-changer, you now know that John Smith is a CTO at a mid-sized tech firm. But if the original data in your CRM misspelled his name or listed an outdated email address, that enrichment process just amplifies the errors. Instead of empowering your marketing automation, you’re perpetuating bad data that could lead to sending irrelevant or embarrassing messages.
- Quality without integration creates silos. Say you’ve spent weeks cleaning up customer data in Salesforce, removing duplicates, validating email addresses, and standardizing formats. Your marketing team is thrilled to have accurate customer records. But when the cleaned data isn’t integrated into your marketing automation platform, analytics tools, or ERP system, you’re back to square one in those systems. Each platform still operates in isolation, using its own outdated, inconsistent data. It’s like patching one tire on a car with four flat tires, you’re still stuck.
- Integration without enrichment limits potential. It’s like creating a high-speed data pipeline but only sending trickles of low-value information through it. The infrastructure is impressive, but the insights are lacking. Enrichment transforms that pipeline into a strategic asset, filling it with rich, actionable data that unlocks personalization, targeting, and predictive analytics.
Quality, integration, and enrichment, is the trifecta of data portability. It’s the key to creating an environment that will deliver against your complex business needs. After all, data flows freely to move your business forward. You need it to be portable.
At Datagence, we believe that data portability is the key to unlocking the full potential of your marketing and revenue operations. Check out how we can help!
