9 Ways to Make Your Business Data More Reliable Your business data is the lifeblood that runs through your organization. It powers automated workflows, gives customer service reps the full story every time the phone rings, and informs decision-making. Even small businesses can benefit from the rise of big data by optimizing their organization's data and creating processes to put it to work. According to Experian, eight in ten businesses believe data is one of their most valuable assets. When your business data is reliable and accurate, it's smooth sailing. But when errors, duplicates, and question marks surface... it's not so pretty. When you can't trust your business data, problems quickly arise and multiply in every area of your organization. Businesses lose as much as 20% of revenue due to poor data quality, shares Kissmetrics. Back in 2013, HBR also talked about the ripple effect of unreliable data as part of "Data's Credibility Problem": "When data are unreliable, managers quickly lose faith in them and fall back on their intuition to make decisions, steer their companies and implement strategy. They are, for example, much more apt to reject important, counterintuitive implications that emerge from big data analyses." To get the best results as a data-driven organization, here are some of the best practices to strengthen the foundations and make your business data the most reliable it can be. 9 Ways to Fix Unreliable Data and Increase Accuracy 1. Improve your data foundations. Data debt – the...

How to Get Started With CRM-Powered Advertising HubSpot was founded during a time when people were under constant attack from aggressive outbound marketing tactics. I'm sure nobody misses the unwanted ads, spam emails, and cold calls that used to interrupt their day back in the mid-00s. Ad retargeting wasn't a thing, so we all had to settle for repeatedly seeing the same ads for products we had absolutely no interest in. Marketing has changed a lot since then. Thankfully. Nowadays, companies have the ability to develop engaging advertising campaigns that complement their inbound strategies and speak directly to their audiences' needs. The concept of journey-based advertising has been widely adopted and marketers can now create customized content for individuals at every stage of the buyer's journey. Targeting has become more sophisticated, meaning that ads are now less interruptive and more informative — so sophisticated, in fact, that that we now take for granted the quality of the ads we get served in our Instagram feeds and YouTube videos. Dare we say it — in some cases, the ad suggestions are actually really useful: "Oh, hey ad for that new running watch that I didn't know I needed but now am obsessed with." There is still a lot of bad advertising and mediocre marketing out there, but it's important to recognize just how far we've come. But, as advertising capabilities have evolved, so too has the digital landscape. And that has created a host of new challenges for marketers. ...