How many times have you seen a retargeting ad enticing you to buy a product you've already purchased? Or received an invitation to apply for a credit card you already have? These kinds of misses undermine your audience's trust in the relevance of your communications.

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What's worse is that such mistakes are entirely avoidable—if companies use the data they already have to better target marketing communications...

Kiki Burton is senior manager of product strategy at Adobe.

I invited Kiki to Marketing Smarts to discuss data management: why it's critical to growing your business (no matter what size company your company is), what your first steps should be, where many companies are getting data management wrong, and how you can make sure your data collection stays on the right side of the law!

Kiki and I also discuss how your company is probably sitting on an untapped goldmine of data that could help you to target your marketing communications, and what you can do to tap into that valuable resource.

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

Lay the groundwork before introducing a data management platform at your company (02:58): "Have a top-down and a bottoms-up approach. You need to ensure you have C-level buy-in to help define the strategy and really set the expectation for change...but it also requires a bottoms- up reorganization to make sure that, at a very tactical level, all of these different groups are aligned.... Make sure that you have a designated representative from every single one of these groups, whether it's Sales, Marketing, [or a] content, direct mail, or data intelligence, or an analytics team.

"Have a sponsor from each of these groups who sits and works together almost on a board to help define and shape what the data management program will be. Then, in parallel, have a very clear and defined owner (or group of owners) who's going to run the day-to-day and the very tactical execution of that platform. But make sure you have buy-in and direction from all these different groups as you're setting forth on your strategy."

Making a new data management plan successful depends on buy-in, and buy-in arises from explaining how the new platform will benefit each team at your organization (04:15): "It's important to really articulate the different use cases...because it's true, every single one of these groups has a different way of how they're going to be speaking to the customer or what their ultimate end goal is, whether it's up-selling or a specific channel or customer retention or acquisition. The use cases can really vary.... Really showcase the art of what's possible when pulling in a data management platform.

"So often, organizations are just used to having access to the data that they have access to, and don't really think about what is possible beyond the existing confinements. And with a data management platform, all of a sudden you're going to have access to a ton of different data sets that another group might have been using or you didn't have the technology to combine with your existing data sets. Really articulating...how these different teams can benefit from this single, cohesive centralized data set is really, really powerful in driving adoption."

Your company's sitting on a goldmine of first-party data; tap into it (16:17): "The first thing I ask [companies] to do is to take an inventory of all of the first-party data that they have. There's a huge expectation in the industry that you're going to have to go and buy all this data...to make sure you have robust audiences. While there's some data sets that you might need to purchase...so often, customers are sitting on a goldmine of first-party data that's just sitting there untapped.

"So we go through an exercise of understanding what do you have in your Web analytics tool? what do you have in your CRM tool? do you do surveys? what do you collect through your email channels? and [we] really do a full inventory of the data that they currently have, and identify which data elements are most relevant for their needs, and make sure all those are incorporated into the data management plan. Then, once all of that first-party data is aggregated, you can start to see where the specific gaps are where they don't have that data natively, then develop a strategy to go and purchase or acquire that data through second- and third-party relationships."

To learn more about Kiki, check out her blog at Adobe.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @khburton. And check out Adobe's @AdobeDMP Twitter account for more information on data management.

Kiki and I talked about much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

This episode brought to you by Citrix GoToWebinar:

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Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on February 3, 2016