Today’s most successful brands have one thing in common: tons of data. If you’re one of those companies that hasn’t quite learned how to navigate the data boom, you’re falling behind. New upstart D2C companies have been increasingly upstaging legacy brands, and that’s because they have collected the data necessary to power ultra-specific customer insights and interactions.

If companies want to compete, they need to learn to play the game. But in order to understand your customers even better than your competitors, you’ll need the data that takes you to that next level.

That’s where data enrichment comes in.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of incorporating raw data from outside sources to enhance and improve your own first-party data. It is the key to developing insights that are critical to marketing strategies and brand growth.

Using data from external sources is the only way to fill in the gaps of discovering who your customers are, especially if you haven’t collected massive amounts of internal data yet. With better data accuracy and customer targeting, your company can provide the tailor-made experiences that customers are expecting.

All successful companies are enriching their data, so how can you gain a competitive advantage if you’ve fallen behind in data collection?

Acquire enrichment data the right way

To keep up with the data-powered business world, you’ll need to collect lots of data, and you’ll need to do it fast. You could acquire enrichment data by partnering directly with other companies or using a third-party service, but both of these options have massive drawbacks.

Striking up a deal with one or two companies to buy their data ensures that you are getting transparent and quality data you can trust, but it takes up excessive amounts of time and resources to ingest data from just a few sources. A third-party data provider allows you to access a variety of data from multiple sources in less time, but the aggregated data you are ingesting is not transparent at all. You won’t have straight answers to where the data has come from, how the data was defined, or how well the data was tested for accuracy.

The competitive solution, which allows your company to access transparent data from numerous sources all at once and acquire that data within a day or two, is to use a data collaboration platform. A data collaboration platform gives you access to a network of quality data providers and provides automated tools that make the data enrichment process easier. You get access to a variety of data and sources, but also can validate the trustworthiness of that data by being able to determine exactly where your data comes from.

By using a data collaboration platform, you increase speed to market, save money, and reduce risk. In less than a week, you could have access to data from numerous valuable sources that will allow you to find new data types, give your existing data a new edge, and test out new hypotheses that could propel your business in a new direction. It’s a win-win situation that your competitors might not be aware of. But acquiring your data is just the first step.

Refine data segmentation and targeting

With enriched data, you can build more precise audience segments. You’ll want to create a complete view of your unique customers by filling in as many gaps in information as you can. The more you narrow and tighten your data sets to focus on specific target segments, the better success your data enrichment strategies will yield.

By creating specific target segments, you’ll be able to improve personalization, delivering only relevant and tailored messaging and experiences to your customers. Understanding who your customers are will make it easier to create ads that they’ll want to engage with and customize marketing messages to capture their excitement, which will in turn drive revenue. The more you show your customers that you understand them and provide them with experiences they want, the higher your conversion rates will climb and the lower your ad spend will drop.

Update and monitor your data

Data enrichment isn’t a one-and-done endeavor. It’s important to make sure your data is continuously enriched or it will decay and lose all value as it ages. You’ll want freshly enriched data to fuel your analytics and insights in order to properly predict buying behavior.

Customer purchasing patterns can change quickly and unexpectedly, but staying informed with a constant stream of updated data will ensure you aren’t blindsided. Use the data you collect to continually perform competitive analyses and make sure you aren’t missing out any important insight that your competitors might have.

Get the most out of your data enrichment strategy with Narrative

With Narrative's data collaboration platform, you can quickly and easily discover and access new data sources with just a few clicks. You’ll also be able to use cutting-edge software to simplify and streamline the process of acquiring data. It’s the most straightforward and cost-effective way to get the exact data you need to enrich customer profiles. It’s as easy as 4 steps:

1. Onboard your raw first-party data to Narrative’s platform.
2. Browse tens of billions of raw data points to find the exact data you need to enrich your customer profiles.
3. Use advanced filtering options and automatic deduplication to make sure your data is just right.
4. Send your enrichment data to your preferred endpoint.

Get the competitive edge you need. Speak to one of our experts today.