Data driven marketing is reliant on high quality data, but with the introduction of social media and its pervasiveness in the marketing tool kit, it is easier to engage with your market without having to have correct emails, addresses, or profiles. It begs the question, does data quality matter anymore for marketing in a Web 2.0 world?
I think the answer is, “Yes, but…”
Direct marketing and bottom of the funnel mindset is what most B2B marketers work in as they have been more closely ties to sales goals. Where sales won’t accept a lead without knowing who it is and the appropriate contact information at a minimum, it has to be collected at every opportunity. Without this information, marketing also doesn’t have an adequate single view of the customer to profile and segment reliably. In this context, data quality is critical as it determines if a lead is passed, how to pass the lead, and align the lead to existing opportunities or account profiles. Name, company, location, phone, and email are the cornerstone to this.
Social media is not outreach, it is in-reach. It isn’t lead generation, it is relationship generation. You don’t collect details on your connections and contacts. You cultivate engagement and conversation. Without the need to maintain a list of connections in your CRM and the ability to leverage social media organizers like HootSuite to communicate to your community, contact information is somewhat irrelevant.
So, where is data quality necessary? Having a single customer view that is inclusive of social media profiles and engagement. At some point, us B2B marketers do need to move relationships out of the 2.0 world and into face to face engagements, particularly for complex sales. At this transition point, the social media profile becomes an invaluable part of the customer view. Just as CRM captures order transactions, direct marketing interactions, and sale interactions, it also needs to show social media interactions. Why? The social media interaction is probably more telling of your relationship with your customers than traditional interactions.
The catch? Linking a limited profile from LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to a standard contact profile in CRM can be problematic. Your CRM system may not have the ability or capability enabled to link the 2.0 world with your customer data. You may not have a social media platform that is capturing what is needed to integrate your customer data between online and CRM. Or, it does, but integration needs to be established. Those are just a few examples.
Ultimately, data quality will matter for social media as B2B marketers mature in their use and linkage of 2.0 activities to best practices for lead creation, nurture, and pipeline generation. We live for now in customer relationship silos, but the real advantage and benefit of social media to show ROI for marketing will be improved integration and profile management across the entire relationship. As soon as integration is introduced, just as in the past, data quality plays a critical role.
