Why B2B Marketers should focus on Data Preparation
The backdrop of B2B marketing has now evolved & companies have started brainstorming about the swathe of their digital footprints, left on several platforms at web, which are utilized in creating hyper-targeted advertisements or campaigns to attract, engage & convert their potential buyers.
Besides, tracing their digital footprints – to measure the endeavors of their marketing & quantify it, to relate to the business objectives (business KPIs) of organizations at large; the B2B marketers also track the vital data about their potential customers. The data related to demographics, technographics, firmographics, psychographic, “fit-data” as well as the past buying behaviors of the prospects & their research methodologies, are scrutinized to segment the prospects into several clusters, to hyper-target them. Artificial algorithms such as K-means clustering also help the marketers in hyper-targeting & converting their prospects through omnichannel marketing endeavors.
Data preparation is the process of manipulating (or preprocessing or self-servicing) the raw, desperate & messy data in a form that can easily be analyzed for various business purposes (often in the form of structured data). Data preparation happens to be the first crucial step in the projects where analyzing data is a sheer necessity & often includes several distinct tasks such as data ingestion, data fusion, data cleaning, data augmentation & data delivery.
The several steps of data preparation may be sub-divided into the following categories:
- Systematic errors which include large volumes of data records, which often are from different sources
- Individual errors that affect a small number of data records which arise due to the errors in data entry