Marketing data integration combines marketing data from different sources to create a unified and steady view. Being capable of gathering separate advertising portions, offers visibility into your normal overall performance and how advertising contributes to commercial enterprise success. If you’re running advertising campaigns on a couple of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. you’ll need marketing data integration.
Businesses will want to better develop their insights numbers. Without proper consolidation of marketing data, your insights will be lost in the deep seas. There are many methods your business can benefit from a solid marketing data integration strategy. Let’s go over a few.
Key Benefits of Marketing Data Integration
Eliminates data silos
A data silo is a group of data that’s isolated and normally only available through one department. Data silos obstruct companies from gaining deep, actionable insights and create a barrier that limits a complete view of the company.
Reduces errors
Data integration works to organise data; it identifies issues automatically, uncovers anomalies and eliminates duplicate information which, as a result, reduces the chance of human error.
Improves business intelligence
Business intelligence is a set of technology-pushed methods that take the newly integrated data and rework it to produce actionable insights. These data-driven insights inform and influence an organisation’s tactical business decisions.
Saves time
Having all your data in a central hub means, you don’t have to waste time trying to access those data from multiple data sources. Data integration gives you a unified view of the data that’s needed to perform particular functions, make decisions and action processes.
Improves departmental collaboration
As we all know, teamwork is the key to running any modern business successfully. Data integration allows different departments to share data which facilitates transparency and opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration.
Data integration facilitates an omnichannel experience
Omnichannel describes the experience a consumer has along with your brand throughout your various platforms and outlets – this consists of everything from your website, e-mail campaigns and social media, to your in-app messages and push notifications.
An omnichannel marketing strategy entails offering a perfectly seamless experience for customers from their first interaction with you to their last – across all channels. When data is fragmented and segregated, this is impossible to achieve. Once a company’s ecosystem is connected, it’s easy to use customer data and provide the omnichannel experiences that people have come to anticipate.
What problems can data integration solve?
Data integration helps businesses get the insights they need, regardless of the industry. It solves marketing data problems—you’re not using any data, you have too much data in too many places, or you can’t manage the data you have with the resources you have—and it helps businesses get the data they need.
Let’s take a look at the advantages of unified data for various sectors.
Ecommerce
Typically, an e-commerce company’s data is dispersed across:
- Paid platforms—like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, or TikTok Ads
- Web analytics platforms —like Google Analytics
- Ecommerce platforms—like Shopify
Bringing this information together allows them to better understand their campaigns’ return on ad spend (ROAS), find hidden opportunities, and keep track of inventory.
Enterprise
Marketing data integration aids huge organisations in making sense of their cross-channel data and delivering insights to those who need them. Creating a single source of truth, in particular, allows them to examine their data at a finer level. An example would be something like which customer category or region brings out the most profit.
Small and medium businesses
SMBs must invest in the channels and activities that pay off with limited budgets and resources. SMBs can use marketing data integration to learn what works and what doesn’t in their marketing efforts, as well as identify untapped opportunities.
Agency
Multiple client ad accounts must be managed by agencies. Agencies may better optimise campaigns, have more time to focus on customers’ accounts, and prove the worth of their work by integrating marketing data.
How does data integration work?
Data integration entails extracting information from a variety of sources or databases and loading it into a single target database. Data can be extracted from databases, flat files, and web services, among other places.
The data must be translated into a format that can be loaded into the target database once it has been extracted. Data transformation is the term for this procedure. After the data has been modified, it may be loaded into the target database using the data loading process.
Data integration tools
Marketing data integration can be accomplished with a variety of technologies. These are some of them:
- Data pipelines that funnel all of your marketing data into a single location. Two Minute Reports is an example of a pipeline that is dependable and can automate data integration.
- Data management platforms provide a centralised location for enterprises to store, manage, and analyse data. You can choose from the following options, depending on your marketing analytics maturity:
- Spreadsheets—Google Sheets or Excel
- Data warehouses—BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse
- Data lakes—Amazon S3, Azure Storage, Google Cloud Storage
- Data visualisation tools, such as Google Data Studio, PowerBI, and Tableau, let you see and comprehend your data by presenting it in a visual format.
- Dbt, Airflow, and Dataform are examples of tools that can help you transform your data and make it ready for analysis.
What actions should you take to develop a marketing data integration strategy?
There are a few steps you’ll need to take if you want to build a marketing data integration plan for your team. Let’s take a closer look at these steps.
Determine your organization’s long-term objectives.
The first stage is to determine the long-term objectives of your company. This will assist you in determining what data you’ll need to collect and how you’ll integrate it.
If you want to improve customer service, for example, you’ll need to gather data on client interactions and behaviours. You’ll then need to combine this information in order to comprehend it and make decisions based on it.
You must think about your company’s long-term ambitions, which go far beyond the original data integration effort.
What strategies will you use to embrace upcoming technologies?
The next step is to consider how you’ll incorporate new technologies into your business.
You’ll need to think about how you can use these technologies to collect and store data. You should also consider adopting these technologies to improve the efficiency of your data integration process. Finally, you’ll have to think about the technology that doesn’t yet exist.
It’s possible that you’ll need some flexibility in your data environments to deal with changes quickly. Open source integration technology is frequently used by businesses since it is generally flexible to new data technology.
Consider the tangible commercial value that your data integration strategy will provide to your firm.
The third step is to consider the business value that your data integration strategy will provide to your firm. This means you’ll have to think about how the data you collect and integrate might help you better your company.
It’s crucial to figure out how much money your data integration approach will save you. This will assist you in justifying your investment and ensuring that it is worthwhile. You must determine the impact of an integration plan on your organisation.
Make sure you have the technical resources and the right people in your business
You’ll need the technical resources and personnel to make the move to marketing data integration work in your company.
You must ensure that you have the appropriate technology in place. This comprises data integration tools, databases, and storage solutions, among other things. You’ll also need to make sure your team is made up of the correct folks. People having the essential abilities and knowledge to complete the project are included.
You should consider collaborating with specialists in this area because you will benefit in the long run.
Started integrating your marketing data?
As you can see, marketing data integration is critical to every company’s growth and success. Because this is a large job, it’s critical to enlist the help of experts.
Two Minute Reports, as a company that manages more than 100 million rows of data per day, can help businesses of all sizes make sense of their data. With 10,000+ customers in over 60 countries, we have the knowledge and experience to help you grow your business with data.
Contact our experts whenever you need assistance migrating your data, or start a 14-day free trial.
Hope this article was of some use to you, thanks and cheers!
