Launching a new campaign is an exciting time. It’s like a crisp, clean dollar bill. It’s got new metrics, new opportunities, new (or renewed) enthusiasm, and new targets. What could possibly go wrong? Well… just about everything. But there are some key elements that are critical to get right at the beginning of a campaign to increase the odds of success and minimize revenue misses. 

Let’s jump into the three big ones.

1. Data hygiene and purity

As the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out.” You could have the most beautifully designed campaign that will set the world on fire and make you a marketing hero. But if your data isn’t accurate, you’ll be sending retirement home content to a bunch of college kids. Inaccurate data is similar to the analogy of the arrow that is 1º off when it’s shot from the bow. It’s hard to tell that it’s off trajectory at the beginning; however, the longer it travels, the more obvious it becomes. But it’s impossible to adjust it mid-flight.

Regardless of the data warehouse or data lake you use, clean and accurate data is a must. It’s a worthwhile company-wide, cross-functional project to improve data integrity and purity for every department involved – from marketing to customer support to legal to sales. This is an essential starting point to ensure all customer interactions are going to the right audience. If you don’t get this right, every campaign is going to struggle to hit its mark.  

2. Audience identification and segmentation

Assuming you’ve completed the “make our data awesome” project and have a central data store for your brand, audience identification and segmentation is the next essential element to get right when building successful campaigns. You can have the best, purest, most accurate data in the world – but it will all fall flat if you don’t get your audiences right. This is one of the most critical steps – and the one that’s often overlooked by many marketers and marketing organizations because it can be painful to do.

Here’s an example: You need your audiences segmented by city and state, and you want three separate groups of people that wear blue shoes, red shoes, and yellow shoes. But you need help from IT writing the SQL query that will provide those results. Two weeks later, you get your audience segmented – but the yellow group also contains people with goldenrod shoes. You didn’t want goldenrod. So, you ask IT to rerun the SQL query excluding the goldenrod group. That takes another two weeks. *Sigh.* Audience segmentation can be laborious and tedious, which is why it’s an easy step to skip (without the right tools). But it’s also incredibly powerful and allows marketers to create very specific, personalized messages, narratives, and stories for a particular audience.

3. Data activation

Your data is good, your audiences are properly segmented, now it’s time to activate the data. What exactly does that mean? Think of it this way. Segmentation tells you who you should send your content to. Data activation tells you when and where and what you’re sending. What is the right time of the day to send to the audience with yellow shoes? How about the blue shoes? And what are the preferred channels for each of these audience segments? Blue shoes like email and social media. Red shoes like text and email. Yellow shoes like paid ads and social media. 

And guess what? Blue shoes returned her shoes and now has red shoes. That information needs to be updated in real time to ensure the blue shoe customer is now in the red shoe bucket, and she is receiving the right story and narrative.

But what happens if you’re not acting on data in real time? Or if you don’t have the right tools to activate your data in real time? Yes, these are rhetorical questions, but you probably know the answer – a less-than-stellar experience for your customers and prospects based on stale, outdated data. And this happens far more often than marketers realize. 

Wrapping it all up

These three areas are the essential starting points for any successful marketing campaign (or sales campaign, or customer support campaign, or legal notification). What technology stack do you currently use to ensure accuracy across all three of these areas? What processes do you have in place to identify gaps in these three areas? It takes some time and effort to get data accuracy, audience segmentation, and data activation tweaked and balanced to best support your efforts, but it’s completely worth the investment. Even the greatest content in the world can’t overcome a misfire if these three core elements aren’t buttoned up.

MessageGears is an enterprise data activation and engagement platform designed with warehouse-native access to your data (whether through Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or some homegrown solution). This means no copying, syncing, or storing of data to create solid, stellar campaigns that are built to win. Chat with one of our data experts to learn more.