How to Get Ahead of Your Competitors by Centralizing Your Marketing Data

Marketing today is, as ever, reliant on data.

But with more and more information available about everything from the performance of your digital marketing channels to individual customers, it can be tricky to make the best use of it. 

Different marketing tools often label and store data differently, while the sheer size of the relevant datasets can make it all but impossible to get your head around it. This is where centralized marketing data can help you - so with that in mind, let’s look at what this means, the benefits, and how to get started. 

What is centralized marketing data?

Centralized marketing data is all about keeping your marketing data in one location. One method to do this is data warehousing - using a centralized data platform to create a data stack that streamlines all your marketing data sources into a single (digital!) warehouse. 

Doing this ensures that your marketing data can be easily and quickly accessed at one location rather than having to contend with dozens of different platforms and formats. Whether gathered from your internal CRM systems or via social media, you can store and analyze it together.  This will allow a more focused approach to your data, with better cross-functionality and more confidence in the security of your marketing data. 

Benefits of centralizing your marketing data 

Storing your marketing data in one location and common format is not simple. It’ll require you to consider what indicators and goal metrics to prioritize and how to establish an infrastructure to support all of this data. However, some clear benefits come from centralizing your marketing data:

Encourage cross-company working

If you have all of your data in one place, it makes collaborative work much easier. Rather than having marketing data siloed off and only accessible by those in the marketing department, it will be fully integrated with other data such as SEO metrics or web analytics. 

Let’s look at a specific example. Imagine your product team is looking into how to create a digital brochure for some new software. They can easily access everything they need to succeed, such as customer data and demographics, previous marketing campaign metrics, website bounce rates, and more. 

Increased accessibility of data

Another way in which centralizing your marketing data will improve productivity is by reducing the time and effort it takes for you to access data. Producing data reports will no longer require you to work across multiple spreadsheets, while many platforms have built-in analytics tools and easy-to-understand dashboards.

You’ll also be able to instantly access data that you want to check or quickly look over, without having to make requests to other departments. All of this will make a work environment that is far more efficient, improving decision-making and giving you and your employees more time to focus on the work that really matters.

Get a holistic view of your data

The biggest benefit you can get from centralizing your marketing data comes from the insights you can get from a holistic view of your data. 

One of the most useful insights is a more accurate picture of your return on investment (ROI). By having your data in one place and one format, you’ll be able to compare the performance of different marketing campaigns, their customer acquisition costs and click-through rates, and whether your ad spend is really worth it.

Similarly, you can use this centralized data alongside top data modeling tools to produce visualizations - making it easier to explain your data analysis to those with less technical backgrounds, and push for optimization of your marketing strategies. 

Create a better customer experience

While the above three benefits are usefully internally, centralizing marketing data also has external benefits. Modern marketing relies heavily on personalization and top-notch customer experiences to boost retention and minimize churn. Having accessible, high-quality data at your fingertips means you can better understand your target audience, ensuring your marketing efforts are tightly focused.

This could be using the data to identify pain points and address them, providing real-time recommendations based on their history with your website, or creating the perfect messaging for your email marketing campaign. 

With Avada Email Marketing, you can take your marketing efforts to the next level by leveraging customer data to deliver personalized and impactful email campaigns.

Whatever the specific initiatives you choose, data-driven marketing can ensure you make the most of your marketing budget.

Additionally, pricing decisions based on quality data can also be made more accurately when you have a centralized marketing data platform, allowing you to analyze the performance of different pricing strategies and optimize your revenue generation. Partnering with an influencer marketing agency can further enhance your marketing efforts by leveraging influential individuals to promote your brand to their engaged audiences.

How can you centralize your marketing data?

Now that you know the clear benefits of centralizing your marketing data, how can you actually start to achieve this in your organization? Here are four main steps that you should follow:  

• Evaluate

The first thing that you must do is assess your company’s readiness for data centralization. Check whether your infrastructure, such as your sales CRM software, is up to date and can work with a centralized data platform. 

You should also evaluate the data sources themselves.  Centralizing data is only worth it if you have good data collection methods in place, so take the time to assess this. Do you track email open rates, and conversion rates from search engine referrals? Do your main data points provide structured or unstructured data, and do you have data analytics to deal with this?

Without taking the time to evaluate the current state of the data you gather, you can easily end up with a central source of unclear, messy information. 

• Organize

Once you’ve confirmed that your infrastructure is ready to work with a centralized marketing dataset, it’s time to organize all of your data. If this sounds like hard work, don’t worry - you can use a data centralization hub to transform all of your data into one shared format while avoiding duplication and silos.

Organizing your data effectively will make it much easier for you to analyze all of your data and improve your marketing campaign performance. Plus, it will help you take steps toward marketing automation in future as the data for predictive analytics will already be in place.

• Store

Once you’ve identified and organized your data, you’ll need to create a dedicated data warehouse for you to store it. You could choose either physical or cloud storage solutions according to your organization’s needs.

Unless you already have the required hardware, however, using cloud storage is probably the best option for you - as well as generally being cheaper and more flexible, this will also make sure that you’ll be able to access your centralized data from anywhere. 

• Share 

Now that you’ve created your centralized marketing data platform, it’s time to put it to work. Tools like Frame.io competitors can be used to produce clear and creative data visualizations of your marketing analytics. At the same time, you’ll also be able to create detailed data reports that allow you to compare and contrast the performance of different marketing strategies. 

As one of the biggest upsides of centralizing your data is the increase in collaborative work, ensure that you share access to the data platform across your organization - with appropriate security policies in place. 

Additionally, consider utilizing a Landing Page Builder to streamline your marketing efforts and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. This tool can help you create engaging landing pages that drive conversions and capture valuable customer data.

Pricing decisions based on quality data can also be made more accurately with a centralized marketing data platform, allowing you to analyze the performance of different pricing strategies and optimize your revenue generation.

Centralizing your marketing data - more effective, simple, and collaborative analytics

Streamlining your marketing data and storing it in one location can make it more accessible, encouraging collaborative work and providing a holistic view of all that helpful data you’ve gathered. And, as we’ve mentioned, it’s not just helpful for your marketing teams - anyone whose work touches on the customer journey can benefit.

Of course, centralizing your marketing data is no easy task, but the benefits are well worth the effort. Starting by evaluating your systems and organizing your data before choosing a storage method. With that in place, you’ll be ready to start using this data across the company - so why not take those first steps today?