Marketers are always on the lookout for the latest low-hanging fruit that can help them capture attention. Low-priced attention with high-value engagement is the holy grail of marketing ROI. But marketing success doesn’t just hinge on your ability to recognize shifts in B2B buyer attention faster than your competitors.

All of your marketing tactics, channels, and strategies are meaningless if you continually fall victim to one of the biggest issues plaguing our profession—bad data.

It’s easy to mask bad data problems by going through the motions in marketing and sales. But when it comes down to results, seeing a return on marketing investments and driving sales success requires a foundation of strong data. The right approach to intent data can get you the results you need.

Summing Up Marketing’s Bad Data Problem

When big data analytics solutions went mainstream, marketers rejoiced. Finally, a means to putting all of the data you collect to good use. But the realization of “garbage in, garbage out” keeps many marketing and sales teams from unlocking the benefits.

One study from IBM found that poor data quality costs U.S. businesses over $3.1 trillion per year. According to the Data Doc, Thomas C. Redman, “the reason bad data costs so much is that decision makers, mangers, knowledge works, data scientists, and others must accommodate it in their everyday work. And doing so is both time-consuming and expensive.”

When you supply sales with bad prospect data, they inevitably waste time trying to hunt down deals that will never close instead of focusing on high-value opportunities.

But what exactly is bad data in marketing? Generally speaking, bad marketing data means that it’s inaccurate. Whether it’s duplicate data complicating your CRM, data missing from contact profiles, data that was incorrectly entered in your CRM, or data that’s just plain inaccurate, bad data will hold your business back.

There are multiple contributing factors to bad data. However, many of these issues stem from an over-reliance on the data you generate with traditional lead generation tactics. While first-party data gives you a strong foundation for marketing strategies, solving bad data problems requires verified intent data that gives you deep insight into the contacts you’re trying to reach.

Solving Bad Data Issues with Intent Data

Third-party intent data is the key to overcoming marketing’s bad data problem. By working with a trusted provider, you can ensure the accuracy of data that indicates where your target accounts are in the buyer’s journey. Not only that, but third-party intent data gives you a reference point to compare your databases to so that you can minimize inaccuracies that may have existed in your CRM for years.

Unlike first-party intent data, working with a third-party provider helps you understand the behavior of target prospects outside of your own website. It’s great to know when a prospect downloads your content or requests a sales demo—but how are they interacting with your competitors? The right provider will give you accurate insights into all prospect behavior so that you can make the best data-driven decisions possible.

Focusing solely on the bad data problems in your own CRM might lead you down the costly path of building out a data science team to overcome “garbage in, garbage out” problems. And while that’s a valuable task, you’ll see greater marketing ROI by striking a balance between third-party intent and first-party data collection.

To help you overcome bad data problems and maximize sales performance, we make sure our intent data is:

  • Most Accurate: We can deliver up to 91% accuracy in predicting purchase intent.
  • Most Actionable: We drive in-market, target company web visits at a quarter of the cost of paid search.
  • Most Targeted: We calibrate intent data to your unique business with nearly half a million keywords to choose from.

If you want to learn more about how third-party intent data can improve your marketing activities and sales performance, download our report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent.