In This Article
- What is Marketing Data Integration?
- Importance of Marketing Data Integration
- Common Types of Marketing Data Integration
- Benefits of integrating marketing data
- Roadblocks in Consolidating Marketing Data
- Best & Practical Ways to Integrate Marketing Data (Step Analysis)
- Having the best support with you when unifying marketing data
Having everything in one place makes coordination easy and effective. Be it marketing operations or anything.
We are talking about consolidating marketing data as a topic for this blog. We aim to understand why you need to unify marketing data, and what benefits you can extract from it. Plus, we are going to explore the steps you need to take here to integrate your marketing data.
Let’s dig in.
What is Marketing Data Integration?
What would you expect when you collect all your marketing data from different sources and put everything together into one place?
Definitely, you can get a cohesive and consistent view of your data. It will become easy for you to track the overall performance of your marketing operations and measure your success percentages. That’s what consolidating your marketing data means.
So, in a formal sense, marketing data integration refers to consolidating data from various marketing channels into a unified data system. It combines data from customer interactions, emails, social media, and other channels into a single view.
Hence, after consolidating marketing data, it will break down your data silo culture efficiently. Plus, it will push the flow of marketing operations for the betterment. Having a consolidated marketing data system proves efficient when it comes to analyzing trends, optimizing strategies, and making improved decisions.
Further, you can gain a holistic view of your marketing activities and their performance under one roof. Doesn’t it sound good?
Importance of Marketing Data Integration
The main barrier in the marketing operations is blocking the information flow. It creates trouble for the marketing team to perform seamlessly and in sync. For removing this barrier, integrating marketing data under a unified system is essential.
Integrated marketing databases ensure a consistent flow of metrics and identifiers across your marketing channels. So, it becomes easy for your marketing team to make important decisions. They’ll have a flow of completed and current data in front of them from which they can make all the decisions.
The following measures you can take seamlessly when you have an integrated database of your marketing operations;
🔺Track website analytics
🔺Managing customer relationships
🔺Monitor social media performance
🔺Track email marketing campaigns
🔺Assessing advertisement efforts
One of the most efficient ways to stop wasting this much time and budget is to unify your marketing data. It cuts delays in manual reconciliation and helps process marketing data in real-time. Interestingly, keeping all marketing data integrated makes the data pipeline clear. That means your teams can act quickly, frame robust strategies, allocate resources, and optimize them using the relevant data.
Common Types of Marketing Data Integration
✦ ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
Pulling raw data from various sources (verified systems) systematically is the “Extract” part. “Transform” means altering the structure, and “Load” means dumping the refined data into a secure repository. Marketers rely on ETL to standardize data fields, and sometimes, when value normalization is necessary.
It is required when there is a need for a predictable and well-defined workflow.
✦ ELT (Extract, Load, Transform)
Reverse the “ETL workflow” and you’ll get an “ELT workflow”. It’s as simple as that.
Unlike the ETL, under this method, you have to load raw data into your repository first. Thereafter, you can perform the transformation on your data that you need. Interestingly, one thing you must note here is that you need a bigger data storage system to apply this method. Plus, the team that you’re working with must be agile in their respective performances.
This ELT workflow perfectly fits into modern data architectures, especially in the complex ones. You can manage various data types coming from different sources, like social media, streaming platforms, and other real-time sources.
✦ CDC (Change Data Capture)
Marketers who need real-time metrics to perform marketing operations need the CDC model. Change Data Capture, as a model, monitors data changes that occur in real time. The main thing is that this model only focuses on altered records. Hence, you can get real-time updates on campaign metrics, lead capacities, and CTRs. Integrating this model into your marketing data can help you reflect on immediate shifts or changes in customer interactions.
✦ Data Virtualization
Virtually represent all your data that comes from different sources using an abstraction layer. No need to relocate your database physically at all. Data virtualization delivers a combined view of your data through a “logical interface”. Whenever trying new things or at the time of checking data storage, data virtualization justifies its name. It represents the entire database without moving anything from its location.
✦ API Data Integration
In a practical sense, integrating marketing data is a complex process, and it requires a seamless flow of data across your marketing tools. APIs are more like automating the system that syncs and shares data in real time. For example, Shopify and Mailchimp collaboration that effectively made Shopify’s marketing and sales teams powerful. They can sync their data in real-time for their marketing work.
✦ Middleware Integration
Middleware tools are the most common in marketing operations. They make sure your marketing data gets constantly flown into your marketing applications. CRM software like NetSuite, Salesforce, etc, is the prime example of middleware integration. These tools deliver up-to-date data to the marketing teams with consistent support.
✦ Propagation
Marketing data integration through propagation ensures that all your data consistently gets synced across all your systems. So that one system connected with another gets all data synced at the same time. Basically, it talks about syncing everything together, like Google Drive or any other cloud storage does.
Benefits of integrating marketing data
If we talk about the benefits of having consolidated marketing data, the list will go on and on without any limit. Marketing teams can get immense benefits if they consider unifying their databases. Due to paucity of time, here we are going to explore only 5 out of the top benefits of integrated marketing data in this section.
➣ Creation of a unified data view
A unified or centralized marketing database provides a holistic view of marketing operations. From teams’ interaction with customers to campaign performances, you can get to explore everything in one place.
Various data consolidation tools are available in the market that can help you create a unified view of your marketing data.
Integrating the marketing database depends on attribution and correlation. Nowadays, AI-enabled software helps marketing agencies consolidate most of their data. However, there’s nothing that can beat manual data selection and consolidation for achieving a unified view. Skilled professionals can easily eliminate potential confusion that may arise due to inconsistent fields. Developing personalized strategies, which are essential for customer targeting, becomes easy when you have a consolidated marketing database in front of you.
➣ Make decision-making faster
It’s obvious that when you can see all the data insights in real time, you eventually make faster decisions. There’s no need to wait for the whole database to sync. You can get quick insights from data at any point in time when you integrate your marketing data.
Marketing teams can rapidly take action when it comes to reallocating the budget, updating creative assets. Because all streams of incoming data are coming into the marketing database are getting synced in real time. This is possible only when you integrate your marketing data. In other words, you create a consolidated platform to collect and combine data from your social channels, ad network, web analytics, and many more.
➣ Improve team collaboration
Marketing teams include some of the most brilliant and creative people. Some of them you may have in your in-house setup, while some of them may not work within the territory of your office. It’s quite obvious they work collaboratively, even if they’re not within your office space. The creation and maintenance of integrated marketing data are highly relevant at this point.
Besides the marketing teams, other teams like sales, finance, customer care, etc, need marketing data for running some parts of their operations. Having a consolidated marketing database that shares direct access to various teams within the organization is a game-changer. Not only insights sharing, this consolidated database can also accelerate the feedback loop as it allows different teams and executives to share consistent values into it.
➣ Increase marketing ROI
ROI stands for “Return on Investment”
We are taking here the returns that you get from marketing operations for which you spend your budget. Simply, the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) that your ads earned when you spent some amount on them.
Marketing data integration boosts ROI in marketing. Because it allows better tracking and analysis of your marketing activities across different channels. Thus, you can identify which strategies are working the best and which are not. Based on the performance of the marketing operations, you can decide to follow up on the best strategies while avoiding the worst ones. This way, you can save your marketing budget and invest in better strategies.
An integrated marketing database provides a clear vision to the marketing leaders. It’s one of the best measures to supervise the marketing performance. Of course, it helps make better investment decisions.
➣ Enhance data accuracy
Creating a single source to store all your marketing data can improve your data accuracy rates. It happens because you can view everything, starting from ad campaigns to conversion mail, within the unified database. Thus, it will become easy for you to detect inaccuracy and inconsistency within your marketing data. Once you detect it, you can immediately take action to rectify it.
Accurate marketing data is immensely important for accurate customer targeting, campaign optimization, and understanding customer behavior. You can enhance the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts when you work with accurate records.
➣ Real-World Scenarios of Consolidating Marketing Data
Suggesting only the benefits without enough backing of evidence sometimes makes arguments lose. But we can’t make this happen. That’s why we are going to explore some of the world-class real case studies to understand how a consolidated marketing database actually works.
Roadblocks in Consolidating Marketing Data
Like any other process, you can face many difficulties when you initiate marketing data integration. Highlighting them is the first thing you need to do here. This section is dedicated to pointing out the expected challenges that you may encounter when you start consolidating your marketing data. See how many of them you find problematic.
i. Culture of Silos
Isolated systems are the biggest roadblock when it comes to consolidating all your marketing data. Usually, marketing data commonly resides in fragmented forms in various systems like CRMs, email marketing tools, or other isolated systems. Having all the marketing data distributed across various platforms makes it difficult to proceed with further operations. It breaks the flow of data and produces a culture of data silo.
ii. Complex Data Formats
Finding a uniform format for all your marketing data is still a dream for many marketers. Similar data formats for marketing data are a rare occurrence. Marketing data can be a content piece, a phone number, or even some PDF files. Due to the unavailability of a uniform format, marketing data integration becomes a challenge.
Having a smooth data conversion process within the system is a real-time need here.
iii. Quality Issues
Inconsistent data is usual in marketing operations; you can find it anywhere. That diminishes the quality of marketing data. When it comes to unifying the marketing channels, inconsistent records create the most trouble. It gets supplemented when duplicate records, missing fields, and incorrect data get mixed with the verified marketing data. Ultimately, it reduces the quality, and that makes a huge impact on your marketing operations.
iv. Privacy Concerns
Marketing data involves personal data like customers’ contact information, web history, cache, cookie information, etc. Therefore, protecting the data using various data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA is essential. However, in many cases, due to a strong presence of data privacy matters, consolidating all marketing data in one place creates issues.
v. Complex Integration
Technical complexity is one of the great obstacles in the integration process. Advanced tools and skills are equally needed when it comes to migrating complex data formats and unifying them. Performing ETL or ELT, both are equally complex. That is why most companies find it difficult to integrate their marketing data at a glance.
Best & Practical Ways to Integrate Marketing Data (Step Analysis)
Unifying the marketing data involves integrating various elements into the process. Before you initiate the process, you need to have a solid plan ready by your side. Following a step-by-step approach can help you consolidate your database without any risks. Let’s explore the steps you need to consider here to unify your marketing data flow.
Step 1: Define objective
First of all, outlining your objective for consolidating your data needs to be done here. Write down clear goals and objectives behind your data integration plan. Having the entire plan written down on paper is a clear sign that you’ll do better during the data integration phase. Interestingly, you can save your time on marketing efforts once the goal-defining phase is completed.
Step 2: Data source assessment
What the databases you’re considering to integrate have to be defined as well. Be it CRM or social media, or email marketing, assessing the data sources is a must. The quality and relevance of the data sources matter here. So, you have to evaluate them well using the right metrics.
Step 3: Develop your data mapping plan
Consolidating all your marketing data simply means you have to combine all your data. It involves merging data from diverse databases and standardizing it, too. Hence, having a data mapping plan is essential here to ensure that all data formats and fields are perfectly aligned.
Step 4: Choose an integration tool
Various tools are now available in the market that promise to make the data integration process smooth and effective. You can select an appropriate tool for this matter that can handle your marketing data integration requirements. When selecting the tools, you have to consider the following things
⟢ Whether the tools can convert your marketing data, which is available in different formats
⟢ It can deal with a heavy volume of marketing data
⟢ Automation facility is available
⟢ Processing complex marketing data is easy
Step 5: Build an integration workflow
Consolidating the marketing database is not a single-step process; rather, it’s a workflow. It involves various processes like extraction, transformation, load, and other processes. Ensure your data consolidation workflow is properly synced and aligned with your objectives.
Step 6: Implement data governance
The consolidated marketing database that you’re going to create must have strong data governance policies to comply with. It helps to maintain the quality, compliance, and consistency of the data in the integrated workflow. A strong data governance policy also ensures that all the roles and responsibilities regarding data management are distributed well among the people.
Step 7: Validate & test
Achieving high Accuracy and total completeness of the integrated marketing data is the end goal here. Therefore, you have to go through a constant testing and validation mechanism to make sure your data is perfect. This also helps in making the best marketing decisions and running campaigns.
Step 8: Optimize and monitor
Monitoring the progress consistently has to be on your list when consolidating your marketing data. Try to find scopes where you can optimize the process flow at this stage. For the best option, you can use analytical tools to identify key areas where you need to monitor well for better workflow effectiveness.
Step 9: Initiate team training
Your marketing team must know how to use your integrated marketing database. Only then can you do better in your marketing operations. Hence, while you do the integration part, you need to train your team to use the integrated platform meanwhile. All you need is trained people to work with your consolidated data platform, right?
Step 10: Review and adapt
Once the integration process is completed, you need to review it immediately. Check whether the integrated marketing database perfectly suits your goals and objectives that you framed earlier. Also, you can make iterative improvements if you want your marketing database to be relevant and effective in the future.
Having the best support with you when unifying marketing data
Unifying the marketing data itself is a complex task. You need to have the right skills and processes to initiate the process. Nowadays, you can have the process easily. We are talking about the tools and technology here. But often we forget the right skills that make these tools work in the right direction.
Many tools promise to automate the entire marketing data integration workflow. But in reality, these tools need constant monitoring and assistance from humans. The reason is quite simple. These tools can make mistakes, and without human assistance, errors can come as an outcome. Hence, it proved, you need people who have relevant skills and knowledge to make your data integration process error-free and faster.
