Put Your Data to Work with Marketing Intelligence

While many teams operate in their own siloed units, marketing intelligence creates a powerful connection, ensuring that a marketer in any role and function can bring together the data, ideas, and conversations that lead to meaningful business results. This creates a more data-curious team that works seamlessly to provide the best experience for your customers and drive business growth. 

Understand Modern Customer Data Management

Like many jobs, the role of the modern marketer, whether CMO of a Fortune 500 company or a mid-level marketer at a small or midsize firm, has undergone a fundamental change in the last decade or so. Marketing used to be seen as more of an art than a science. In the past, marketers were always on a quest to find a new creative idea for their campaigns that would capture the imagination of their current and potential consumers. 

While creative ideas play a critical role in marketing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, data is becoming more crucial to the modern marketer than head-turning creative ideas. That’s because data is helping marketers meet customers’ growing desire for more personalized experiences from the brands they interact with. 

Companies and online services like Netflix, Amazon, and Google use data to create more and more personalized engagement and experiences. These experiences can include a movie, product, or a news story recommendation that seems exactly tailored to an individual consumer’s experiences or interests.  

And now consumers are expecting premium experiences from the brands that engage them, and they say it is as important as the product or service they are looking to buy.

This major shift in consumer expectations is causing marketers to try to use their customer data to drive more of these personalized experiences. They want a 360-degree view of each customer. And they want to understand how their brand engages with that customer across every touchpoint, including sales, commerce service, web and mobile, email, and others. Once the marketer has this view, they can begin to drive more of the personalized 1:1 type of experience consumers expect. They also want this data to offer critical insights about their target customers that can help them understand how to make their overall marketing more efficient and effective.  

However, marketers are running into major challenges on the way to true data-driven marketing. The biggest challenge of all may be data unification. Many marketers are challenged by the fact that the systems that store and process their customer data were originally built for purposes other than marketing. Marketers are often separated from each other and controlled by a company’s IT department. For example, an in-store point-of-sale system is probably separated from the company’s email database, which may be separated from the eCommerce system. A recent survey of marketers shows that the average marketer has about 15 sources of consumer information within their organization. 

High-performing marketers are 1.7x more likely than underperforming marketers to consider solving for identity as a critical marketing technology requirement.

(Salesforce State of Marketing, Fifth Edition)

Get a 360-Degree View

The challenge: When growth is your goal, you need a 360-degree view of how your campaigns are performing—in real-time and across all channels and markets. You can’t afford to have your data living in silos when you’re trying to get a full picture of your customers. But without the right tools, data integration can be a complicated, time-consuming process.

The solution: With marketing intelligence tools, you can seamlessly connect your data, no matter the source, and view it within a single dashboard. This dashboard gives you valuable insights and information to inform business goals.

Build Budget Transparency

The challenge: You need to understand exactly how your budget is being spent at every level. Transparency in your business is critical—both clients and the industry demand it. This is no easy task, especially if you manage multiple business units, dozens of channels, and hundreds of product lines—all across many countries. With traditional tools, you need time, technical expertise, and investment to address this big challenge. 

The solution: Marketing intelligence gives you the ability to bring together your data in an automated way, to see exactly what’s happening at every level of your KPIs—whether ROI, growth, or loyalty. With tools like Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud platforms, you have what you need to establish accountability across your budget and report back on every marketing dollar spent. 

Measure KPIs with Confidence

The challenge: You need to go beyond clicks and views to understand which business metrics are being influenced by marketing and how that impacts business goals across the entire organization. (Think: revenue, market share, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, churn, cross-selling, upselling, and more.) Your marketing programs should reflect what the business is trying to achieve overall. 

The solution: Marketing intelligence makes it easy for stakeholders across the business to access and understand performance metrics. Once aligned, everyone can collaborate on the goal of driving growth—working from the same facts about what data is available, how it’s being used, and its impact on overall marketing performance. Whether it’s tracking conversion, recurring revenue, market share, or other metrics, with marketing intelligence, your business can align on the key KPIs that support the ultimate goal: total revenue (or total growth).

Create Cross-Team Alignment 

The challenge: Developing a system for marketing measurement and analytics isn’t a one-and-done project. You need team collaboration throughout every level and department of your business. 

The solution: While many teams operate in their own siloed units, marketing intelligence creates a powerful connection, ensuring that a marketer in any role and function can bring together the data, ideas, and conversations that lead to meaningful business results. This creates a more data-curious team that works seamlessly to provide the best experience for your customers and drive business growth.