Why Marketing Needs a Data Budget

Most organizations are entering the budget planning season for 2026. If you’re a CMO or other marketing leader, you’re likely prioritizing investments in media, technology, and creative. But without equally deliberate investment in data as a core asset, these other areas will underperform. Too often, marketers layer data onto campaign execution in a piecemeal, fragmented way. This approach represents a significant missed opportunity to holistically unite marketing efforts, enhance audience understanding, and ultimately boost campaign performance over time.

Marketers shouldn’t treat data as an afterthought or add-on — it deserves its own line item in the marketing budget. Here’s why, and how you can make this investment a priority at your company.

Data in the Driver’s Seat

We’re in an era of overcorrecting the big data boom of the last 10 to 15 years, where all businesses were instructed to accumulate as many datasets as possible. Many companies never figured out what to do with all of this data, so they never did anything. That’s because the real question isn’t about having enough data — it’s about having the right data to meet your goals.

A recent survey of global marketers reveals that data quality issues are the second-biggest roadblock to maximizing data value, surpassed only by disconnected platforms. Marketers also spend a staggering 32% of their time managing data quality, yet 26% of marketing campaigns were hurt by substandard data in the last 12 months, according to Forrester research. If you start with insufficient, patchy, or outdated data that you must then try to make work, you’ve failed before you’ve even begun. And while evolving privacy regulations and the declining performance of specific digital identifiers have prompted more marketers to adopt first-party data strategies, this information, although high-quality, is limited.

“First-party data is a good thing, but the trouble is you only have what you have,” said Jon Ewing, head of marketing at Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics. “If you only start with the data you have in the building today, that’s like that old saying, ‘If the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’”

Marketers need a budget to buy accurate, regularly refreshed data to fill gaps in their customer understanding. This applies to both B2B, B2B2C, and B2C brands. B2C brands, for instance, can make use of business-context data, such as the workplaces, professional roles, and purchase histories, to understand audiences holistically. Enriching data can also help identify new audiences beyond what current personas reveal.

These data investments compound in value. Unified data strategies build institutional knowledge of prospects and customers, driving ongoing improvement instead of starting from scratch with each campaign.

AI in Marketing and Sales Raises the Stakes for High-Quality Data

Investing in the right data also helps future-proof marketing strategies — especially as AI increasingly comes into the mix.

AI models are only as effective as the data they rely on. Poor data leads to poor AI performance and output, weakening the marketing programs and strategies that are based on them. AI systems leverage both structured and unstructured data. Both types can come from either first-party sources (like internal databases and customer interactions) or from third-party providers (such as external datasets or public content). Good data hygiene and data enrichment help you create more comprehensive, useful, accurate, and current data, which leads to better AI output and performance.

“So the underpinnings, the cleansing, the enriching, the kind of standardization of your own data, be it first-party or be it augmented with third-party, is so vital because your marketing suffers when you have poor quality data,” Ewing said. “And AI makes good data quality even more crucial.”

And the stakes are massive. Underperforming AI models built with low-quality or inaccurate data cost businesses up to 6% in annual revenue — or $406 million on average. There are also legal and ethical considerations that could damage a brand’s reputation and operational integrity.

High-quality data that is current and enriched, on the other hand, empowers AI tools to make more informed decisions, with greater accuracy and timeliness. For marketers, this delivers more reliable outcomes.

To Get the Right Data, Start With the Right Questions

It’s true that we now have better tools to understand data than we did 15 years ago. But to start making smarter data investments, all marketers really need is a skill they already possess:  asking better questions.

“The absolute key question is: ‘Are you starting with the marketing objective that you’re trying to achieve, and then working out what data you need to achieve it, or are you starting with the data that you have today, and trying to figure out if it’s enough?’” Ewing said. “If you start with the problem at hand and work back into what data you might need to solve it, then you can start to evaluate data based on its effectiveness at solving the problem.”

Data underpins how you take a campaign to market. Developing a media or creative strategy to try to influence an audience without knowing who that audience is or the best way to influence them makes little logical sense. So take a step back and think about what you are trying to do in a given campaign:

• Who am I trying to influence?
• What do we want them to think or feel?
• What is the best way to influence them?
• Which creative do I need to do that?
• What data do I need to do that?

Expanded, enriched data “sheds more light onto what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, how it’s performing, and where we should be changing what we should be doing differently,” Ewing said.

As a result, this data can help you prioritize where your campaign spending goes, which optimizes the overall marketing budget.

Five Quick Tips To Make Better Investments in Data

Adding data as a line item to your overall marketing budget doesn’t have to be complicated. In addition to asking the right questions, here are a few other ways you can start down this path.

• Pick one data item: “Think about the one piece of information you would love to have that is most likely to help drive the outcomes you want to go for,” Ewing said. “Then go source that.”

• Determine how to use it: Figure out how the procurement process works, how to get the data into your marketing systems, how to build segments — all the things you need to do to make that one piece of data actionable. After you’ve done all this for the first time, it will become easier each subsequent time.

• Gauge performance simply: “Assuming you are using the right data to ask the right questions to drive your campaign, the better the quality of the data is, the more impact it will have on your campaign performance,” Ewing said.

• Start scrappy: You don’t need a fancy tool to get started or to measure success. You can use Microsoft Excel and get 85% of the benefit — you don’t need to get everything perfect on Day One.

• Have good relationships: Since data impacts the entire organization, marketers need a good rapport across departments to increase their investment and experimentation. “It’s about having people trust where you’re coming from and understand where you’re trying to do it and work within their boundaries to be able to do what you need to do,” Ewing said.

Data plays a key role in helping marketing teams to innovate and evolve their strategies. Treating it as an investment, not a cost center, helps businesses adapt faster to regulatory changes, market shifts, and technological disruptions — both now and in the future.