This is Not Your Father’s Economy
Remember the good old days? Work hard. Produce better products. Earn a Living. Back before the technological boom, about the only data a producer needed was “where should I send your widget?”
Today’s Economy is in the Business of Information. Small to Mid-sized Businesses (SMBs) now have access to Big Data in a big way, and those who aren’t catching on are quickly losing their footing. You may still produce and sell old-economy widgets, but if you can’t intelligently absorb and respond to vast amounts of information, one of your competitors will be happy to fulfill the ever-mutable needs of the new economy.
According to a 2010 MIT Sloan Survey and Study, the highest performing companies were 3x more likely than lower performers to be sophisticated users of analytics and were more than two times more likely to say that their analytics use were a competitive differentiator. All signs indicate that this trend continues in 2013.
How Bad is Bad Data?
A statistic from the Data Warehousing Institute’s publication Data Warehousing and the Bottom Line tells us, “2% of records in a customer file become obsolete each month due to death, bankruptcy and moving.” That gives an average error rate of 24% per year, assuming your organization has never inaccurately recorded a client’s name, business name, address, or phone number, experienced data loss due to systems migration or instituted changes in data sources.
Businesses that don’t regularly cleanse and update their customer records or whose sales reps and employees lack consistent record maintenance skills could see as much as 50% or more critical inaccuracies on their current customer file.
In the words of John Weathington, CEO Management Systems Inc. “There’s no faster way to lose credibility, than to produce two different answers to the same question,” Similarly, there is no faster way to lose money than to spend valuable marketing dollars to duplicate or invalidate customer entries. According to marketing industry professional Hollis Tibbetts, bad data costs the US Economy over$3.1 Trillion every year.
We work daily with professional marketers across an immensely diverse spectrum of industries. In our experience, any good marketing professional will tell you that their current customer file is their greatest source of actionable marketing intelligence. If your organization is making vital marketing decisions based on the firmographics and conversion rates of bad data, the costs will skyrocket as wasted marketing dollars are poured down the drain.
If you suffer from potentially bad data NAICS Association can quickly help you resolve this problem. By cleaning up your data and appending additional fields such as NAICS and/or SIC Codes and descriptions, annual sales, year started and number of employees you will have all you need to perform data analysis and further define your marketing plan based on that analysis. Defining your target audience is a vital step that needs to be undertaken before initiating your marketing efforts. By cleaning and augmenting your customer information you are adding vital tools to your marketing toolbox, tools you will need if you plan to generate profitable marketing campaigns now and in the future!