Published Sep 12, 2024
Mastering integrated marketing analytics: Decoding data for better insights
- Data is essential for successful integrated marketing campaigns.
- To use this data, you need to extract, transform, and sync it with your operational systems.
- Once you’ve done so, you can use it for forecasting, promotion planning, reporting, and more.
Successful sales, marketing, and customer success teams rely on real-time data and analytics to guide their integrated marketing campaigns across the buyer and customer journey. Without this alignment, go-to-market (GTM) and customer adoption strategies are merely guesses, and resonating with your target audience becomes a game of chance.
By empowering your teams with data, you can help them gain deeper insights into your audience’s interests and pain points. This data can also unlock a range of creative ways to enhance the team’s ability to attract and engage leads, such as personalization and targeting.
However, giving your business team access to their data is easier said than done. GTM campaigns often rely on multiple applications to complete their processes, from customer resource management (CRM) to marketing automation platforms, causing data to become siloed across different systems.
To equip your team with essential insights and analytics, you need to extract data from your various sources and transform it effectively. Learn how you can leverage cloud data warehouses with Celigo’s iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) to ensure key data is ready for analytics platforms, as well as customer adoption and marketing automation platforms. Check out our on-demand webinar, “Decoding data to fuel SaaS marketing analytics,” to dive in.
For a preview of the topics covered in this webinar, keep reading.
Getting started
In order to analyze critical components of your GTM strategy, like marketing ad spend or customer adoption, your team will need a holistic view of your data. To accomplish this, extract data from your applications and data sources and transfer it to a data warehouse, such as Snowflake, or a data lake.
One way to achieve this is by integrating your tech stack. This allows you to automatically sync data between your applications and your data warehouse.
However, most modern GTM tech stacks include dozens of key applications, which can complicate the integration process. Make sure you select an integration solution that will make integrating your tech stack as simple as possible, like an advanced iPaaS.
Before you begin extracting your data from your key sources, there are several steps you should take to ensure success:
- Understand your business goals and priorities: Make sure you have stakeholder alignment on what data and insights will serve the business.
- Prepare your data: Ensure you have data from your key applications and data sources readily available.
- Ensure data quality: Make sure that the data is clean, accurate, and up-to-date.
- Adopt key technologies: Invest in tools for data integration, analytics, and data warehousing to help you extract and transform your data.
- Track and measure: Determine the data sync frequency you’ll need based on your business goals, so you can provide the right data at all times.
Accessing your sales, marketing and customer data
After preparing your data, you can start extracting it and syncing it with your key systems. Here’s an example of how you can access holistic ad and customer data:
- Extract data from ad sources, such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Meta, and customer data from Gainsight.
- Transfer both sets of data to a cloud data warehouse or a data lake using ETL (extract, transform, load).
- Clean and preprocess the data to ensure data consistency and accuracy.
- Normalize the data to create a unified schema that uses common identifiers like customer and campaign IDs.
- Merge these two sets of data together.
- Use reverse-ETL to sync key data from your data warehouse into your operational systems of engagement, such as Salesforce or Hubspot.
- Leverage this data to create key reports, dashboards, and insights for your team within their system of choice.
Explore what this process looks like using Celigo.
Once you have access to your data, you can use it for a variety of purposes. Let’s take a look at a few ways your marketing team can leverage this data for success.
Forecasting
You can use paid search ad spend data to build forecasting models. With these models, you can implement machine learning algorithms to predict future budget planning based on different ad spend scenarios. By simulating different spending levels, you can assess the potential impact on your sales pipeline from marketing investments.
Performance analysis and reporting
You can also use this data with visualization tools like Tableau or PowerBI to create dashboards that provide insights into the performance of marketing campaigns. This allows you to generate reports that analyze the effectiveness of promotional strategies and share these insights with relevant stakeholders. You can then use those reports to inform future marketing strategies.
Explore this use case on how to pull customer adoption data into your CRM, such as Salesforce, to align your customer success and sales teams.
Promotion planning
Another way you can use this data is for promotional planning. Once you’ve identified potential surplus or shortage using forecast data, you can develop promotional strategies. You can also use this data to time promotions effectively, ensuring they align with anticipated demand.
AI analysis
This data can also be used with a large language model to open up a variety of automations. For example, you can use a Slackbot to query AI about your data. This allows your teams to get quick summaries of sales calls and details about customer adoption. Dive deeper into how you can build out these capabilities with our blog, “Natural language business intelligence: Fusing AI and SQL.”
Learn more about how you can leverage large language models to query your data.
Building integrated campaigns with data and analytics
Accessing the right sales, marketing, and customer data is crucial for informed decision-making and strategic planning. With integration, you can ensure your business teams have the quality data they need to create effective integrated marketing programs throughout the customer journey.
Now, your team can improve forecasting, optimize promotional strategies, and gain key insights into customer and sales trends. Ultimately, this leads to improved marketing ROI and overall business growth. Dive deeper into how you can unleash the power of your data with our on-demand webinar, “Decoding data to fuel SaaS marketing analytics.”
Don’t miss our next webinar, “Modern data stack – Data Lakehouse Patterns and Snowflake,” October 9th. And, get caught up on the entire series here.