Why companies aren’t using unified data and BI in their marketing campaigns

One of the main issues your marketing department struggles with daily is measurement. How do you gather, measure, understand, andmake good marketing decisionswithout access to reliable, verifiable data and insights?

It’s a common problem. Customer service, operations, sales, IT, and other departments are swamped with information. It’s difficult to merge all of this data to help make important marketing decisions. For example:

The answers are in there somewhere. Big data analytics can help to bring together and unify all your company’s marketing data, allowing marketing leaders to base decisions on business intelligence and deep insight. So why aren’t more brands using this kind of unified approach, merging their data from various silos?

To get some answers, I spoke with John Loury, President ofCause and Effect Strategy, a marketing and analytics agency based in upstate New York. Loury is a firm believer thatallmarketing must be strategically linked to goals, ROI or business KPIs. His experience speaks to some of the key principles at play here, and how to overcome them to use data for real growth.

With the right data, your marketing team can make much smarter decisions regarding where, when, to whom and how to market products and services. This translates directly into higher revenue and better profits for your organization.

Here’s his take on how it all works.

The first thing to realize is that you can’t analyze and understanddata in silos. You need a unified, centralized place to store and analyze all of your marketing data to make informed decisions.

“Today, most of the challenges we encounter are rooted in self-fulfilling prophesies or misconceptions of what is now possible with business intelligence and analytics,” he explains. His team hears a lot of excuses for not effectively merging the silos, things like: “We don’t have enough data to aggregate,” or “Our sales and marketing departments don’t work well together, so they don’t share information.”

There’s even some fear over automated BI will automate tasks and democratize data, which could impact job security and prestige. So getting buy-in and agreement across the organization is crucial.

Unifying and structuring complex datasets from diverse sources – and overcoming the human objections in the process – is one of Cause and Effect’s specialties. The goal is to create a way for even non-technical team members can perform their own analyses.

“We use Sisense BI because of its ability to easilymerge diverse and siloed data setsthat exist inside and outside of a company’s four walls,” he explains. “In some cases, we can connect in near real-time and aggregate data sources like Facebook, Salesforce, and Google Analytics that are siloed, along with data that’s stored internally like sales, accounting, homegrown CRM, etc.