Creating a strong data ecosystem

Business intelligence and customer data platforms

The data strategy imperative

As the marketing tech stack continues to grow, operations become more complex. Marketing needs to champion business investment in connecting up the different pipelines and systems of data across a business. Different insights can be layered to form a coherent and complete view of a given buyer and customer as possible.

Ideally, data integration and analysis should be done centrally, business-wide, with the help of a comprehensive business intelligence system.

But marketers can more independently take steps to consolidate and integrate the streams of customer data they create from content and experiences and more readily control, for instance through a customer data platform.

Forrester predicts that advanced firms will double their data strategy budget in 2020, and that forty percent of firms will launch a data literacy lifeline to ensure survival.

Does your marketing function have a data strategy?

Yes, it's an integrated part of the business-wide data strategy
Yes, but it's not part of an integrated data strategy
We're in the process of defining one
No, but it's on the agenda for 2020
No, and no current plans to shape one

The next 5 to 10 years will require major investments from enterprise companies to rewrite their data infrastructure to handle the growing needs for data and integration

Joel Carusone, CEO, Radius Intelligence

Connecting your data

Building and making use of a robust data-ecosystem typically follows five stages

1. Strategy

Bring together people from across functions to nail down what you want your data strategy to achieve. How will you know if it's successful? This could include increasing customer lifetime value, reducing sales cycles, increasing market penetration or reducing costs. Management buy-in is critical to establish a data-driven culture and give the project the weight and legitimacy it needs to take hold.

2. Discovery

Identify the types of data you need to achieve the objectives outlined in stage one. Establish what data is currently being captured by the business and how these can be integrated, identify gaps and research potential sources to fill them.

3. Data architecture and analysis

Integrate all internal and external data required by the strategy into a single source where it can be explored and modeled to gain insights. This is where the fun really starts. You'll be able to find solutions to known problems but also uncover new and unknown opportunities for improvement.

4. Process design

Armed with data-based insights and knowledge pulled from your data, you're ready to start making operational changes to strengthen transparency, improve customer experience and design more effective ways of working.

5. Governance

Your data ecosystems need continual oversight.Update and evolve technologies and processes as needed. Outcomes need to be regularly reviewed and expectations managed.

Top business intelligence platforms

What's a BI platform?

Business intelligence platforms provide an architecture for data ecosystems. Businesses use them to analyze and visualize data from all kinds of sources across the company and beyond, extracting actionable insights that can inform and improve decisions and strategy.

Domo

G2 Score: 4.4/5
Domo creates a truly digitally-connected organization

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Looker

G2 Score: 4.4/5
Business intelligence, built on the platform for data

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Tableau Server

G2 Score: 4.1/5
Governed self-service analytics at scale with Tableau Server

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Sisense

G2 Score: 4.4/5
Radically innovative business analytics

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Microsoft Power BI

G2 Score: 4.3/5
Go from data to insight to action with Power BI Desktop

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Top customer data platforms

What's a CDP?

Customer data platform (CDP) software are tools that give marketing teams a 360 view of the customer by grabbing information from multiple data sources, including first-party, second-party and third-party online and offline data. They are designed to create robust buyer profiles and help improve targeting for marketing companies .

Exponea

G2 Score: 4.8/5
Highly personalized customer experiences for e-commerce businesses made simple

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Emarsys

G2 Score: 4.0/5
Impact ready marketing platform that delivers results, fast

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Tealium AudienceStream CDP

G2 Score: 4.4/5
Collect, enrich, and take action on your customer data

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Optimove

G2 Score: 4.3/5
Built for smart marketing teams

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Segment - Personas

G2 Score: 4.7/5
Personalize every interaction.

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