By krbaker@hubspot.com (Kristen Baker)

You don’t want to waste time simply guessing what a prospect or customer wants and needs from your business or how they’ll react to a certain marketing campaign or strategy that you plan to implement.

Rather, you can turn to the process of data-driven marketing to make informed decisions that are based on real data to ensure your marketing efforts are relevant to prospect and customer interests and behaviors.

Now you might be thinking about the fact that your business has a large volume of complex data that are dispersed across multiple sources — this is where data mapping comes in handy.

Data Mapping

Data mapping is a key part of data management and data integration. That’s because it ensures you’re looking at and considering all of your data and doing so accurately — in other words, data mapping is what allows you to integrate your data from multiple sources.

In this blog post, we’ll talk more about what data mapping is, why it’s useful, data mapping techniques, and data mapping tools.

What is data mapping?

Data mapping is the process of matching data fields or elements from a source, or sources, to their related data fields in another destination — it’s how you establish relationships between data models that are in different sources or systems. Data mapping software and tools automatically match data fields from one data source to another for you.

Data mapping allows you to organize, distill, analyze, and understand vast amounts of data that live in various locations so you can draw conclusions and insights.

Why is data mapping useful?

Here are some more reasons why data mapping is both useful and necessary:

• Integrate, transform, and migrate data as well as create data warehouses easily.
• Establish direct relationships between your data across multiple sources at once.
• Ensure your data is high quality and accurate (data mapping software can automatically flag inconsistencies and data that isn’t high quality or accurate).
• Identify real-time trends and share data reports with team members both easily and efficiently.
• Ensure you’re getting the most out of your data and applying insights and learnings appropriately.
• Use data mapping software to simplify (and automate much of) the process of code-free data mapping.

Data Mapping Examples

A business like Amazon may use data mapping to accurately target you. They do this by pulling insights from your browsing habits, reviews, purchase history, and time on page. They can then pull and connect that data to/with data from other sources such as demographic information.

By combining these types of data sources, Amazon has the necessary information to target you with certain products and personalize your shopping experience in a number of ways (e.g. based on challenges you may be facing, geographic location, experience level, interests, education, nationality, age, and more).

Let’s consider another data mapping example — say you work for a TV network and you’re looking to organize TV shows on the …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron