Today more and more companies are investing in better data practices. Organizations are now opting to invest in a data center consolidation with providers like CentricsIT to keep their data all in one place and secure. Today data consolidation is pretty essential to the modern marketing ecosystem. You can easily combine your CRM, Advertising, email, web performance, and other relevant intelligence all in one place.
With that in mind, what are the best data consolidation practices that will help you save money and time? Here are some of the practices that will save you a lot during your data center migration.
Start with the most valuable data
Data consolidation can be a big deal, especially with different audiences, marketing channels, and campaigns on enterprise-level businesses. It might take a while to achieve complete data consolidation, so experts advise starting with data sets that provide the most valuable insights.
Reduce your dependence on “walled gardens.”
Having successful data consolidation allows you to have general control over your audience data. However, this becomes hard, especially in ‘walled gardens’ data environment. Websites such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon use a great deal of third-party data to gather data for their marketing campaigns. But, you don’t own the data; hence you cannot consolidate it or control it. While most companies can’t stop using Facebook and Google ads, you can opt to reduce your over-reliance on such platforms. Use your technology to track your users to make it easier for you to control, unify and analyze your audience data.
Ensure consistency in data types
Data types must be consistent across all platforms. You will find that different platforms will illustrate and categorize data in contrast. You do not want to discover this once you have consolidated your data. A good example is when one uses a different data format from the other or one tool denotes currency different from the other. So you have to ensure that your tools adapt the different data types before transferring rather than fixing it after you have transferred it.
Ensure data completeness
It is pretty easy to run into issues if you are transferring data that is not complete. Remember that different tools use different ways to sort and categorize consumer data. If you do not have complete information about your customers and leads, you will quickly get issues in the future. A good example is when a tool identifies your customers by their names and another identifies them by their email addresses. If you transfer data with the email addresses missing, the tool will not categorize and distinguish those leads properly.
There are many advantages of data consolidations, but there is also a lot of room for errors. You have to be very careful with how you plan to undertake your data consolidation. You need to ensure that you consolidate your data accurately, reduce the time you invest while maximizing the value for your marketing and sales strategy.
