How To Enable Your Marketing Team with the Right Data

In the fast-paced world of startups and young enterprises, the ability to make data-driven decisions and execute personalized marketing strategies is crucial. However, there's a significant roadblock that many face without realizing it. They feel the pain and the pause of progress without being able to determine the real cause. That cause is data access (or lack thereof).

Specifically speaking about marketing teams, data is what enables all efforts to be that much more effective, efficient, and automated. Marketing teams not only need data but easy access to it in order to keep up with the demands of today’s ever-evolving marketplace.

Unfortunately, the control over this data is usually tightly governed by technical teams such as engineering, IT, or the data team (this is a newer department in emerging startups).

The Hierarchical Hurdle

While it makes sense for data to be managed by these teams from a hierarchical perspective, it tends to create an impediment rather than enablement for marketing operations, often creating unintentional bottlenecks and greatly slowing down progress.

This dynamic rears its face differently depending on the size of the company. When sitting down with numerous marketing execs from small tech startups to more established Fortune 500 companies, the problem persists although in different cases. For the smaller startups, they struggle with implementing data warehouses and provisioning access across departments. Larger companies tend to deal more with the availability of their IT team. Regardless of the size of the request, it’s often placed in a queue without a timely response.

In both cases, this centralized control can slow down marketing initiatives and limit the agility needed to respond to market demands swiftly.

And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s only going to get that much more complicated as more technology is introduced and adopted (or at least attempted to be adopted). The bigger your tech stack becomes, the more platforms your data exists in, making the unification of the data an additional struggle along with the easy access to it.

Software Is Only Part of the Solution (and Problem)

For marketing teams to operate efficiently, they need software that provides such easy access to critical data. This is where Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) come into play. CDPs are designed to provide easy, non-technical access to data that would otherwise be buried deep within the organization's infrastructure. They empower marketing teams to retrieve and utilize data without having to rely on other departments constantly.

And for that reason, there has been a rise in Customer Data Platform (CDP) offerings but not as rapidly as needed. CDP.com projects that the market for such software will grow from $7.4 billion in 2024 to $28.2 billion by 2028. In comparison to AI, where its market size jumped from $50 billion in 2023 to $184 billion in 2024 (statista.com), you see this software is emerging at a snail’s pace relatively.

While it can be debated which software is the best, Segment leads practically every review site and agency preferences given they were the first to market. However, that isn’t to say other offerings shouldn’t be considered. I’ve had some success with RudderStack , and even Klaviyo is adding a CDP offering to their app to provide deeper data insights without the heavy lift of implementation.

However, this technology is still early and not yet accessible to the smaller end of the enterprise spectrum of businesses. In addition, a lot of companies that have successfully implemented a CDP still struggle with data integrity and marketing enablement. Hence, why software plays a heavy role in the solution and the problem.

You Need a Liaison

This is why a liaison, on behalf of the marketing team, is needed. A liaison bridges the gap between marketing and data management by operating as a spokesperson for marketing to ensure the data/tech team organizes the data with marketing use cases in mind. They are able to do this because they understand the nuances of marketing needs and how data is structured and stored.

With ever-evolving marketing needs and difficulty in centralizing data with software, the role of a liaison becomes indispensable and hard to find. Without this crucial role, data enablement for marketing becomes incredibly challenging, if not impossible.

This role can be internal or external. In fact, I’ve operated in both capacities with a high level of success. Any person that fills this role must be a strategic thinker that can create and easily interpret marketing strategies. Next, they must have a strong ability to understand current technologies and learn new ones quickly. They carefully analyze the best software based on the strategic marketing needs and have the know-how to implement it themselves or effectively guide the implementation.

Lastly, they must be good with numbers and logic. Meeting all three criteria is what turns this person into more of a unicorn than a racehorse. History has shown that people tend to lean either to the strategic thinking side or the technical side… but rarely both. Coupled with a need to be able to interpret data and think logically around execution based on such interpretation, and you see why you probably haven’t filled this role yet.

But don’t lose hope! These marketing and data professionals do exist. You’re reading an article written by one. It is very much possible for you to have someone who ensures your data platform is integrated correctly, manages it effectively, and guarantees that the marketing team has continual, easy access to the data they need. Hopefully, this article will help you better understand exactly what you need to be looking for in the marketplace and shed some light on why you have been struggling with leveraging data in your marketing.

Was this helpful? Consider share this newsletter with marketing leaders and teams who are looking to get more out of their marketing and technology. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single edition when they are released.