Data ownership: How to gain deeper insights from your marketing data 

Today, the job of marketing professionals is nothing short of overwhelming. The platforms they are on, the channels they manage, the data they generate ⁠— and let’s not forget that they have to make sense of it, too ⁠— it’s a list that goes on and on. 

Marketing technology is developing at a pace that marketers can barely keep up with. There are about 8,000 martech solutions out there compared to almost 1,000 fewer the year before. Data products seem to be the fastest growing category of all with 25% of growth over the past 12 months. And that’s only logical. With more and more data being generated, marketing professionals need the right tools to make the most of it. The question is, though, what are those tools?

To use their data to the fullest, marketers need to have maximum control over it. They need to have the place and capacity to store it, to have access to it at all times, and the ability to analyze it quickly and share it with the relevant people in their organization. With data being scattered across platforms and channels, there is an increasing need to centralize the flow and location of it all.

There is an increasing need to get ownership of their data and what better way to do so than with the help of a marketing data warehouse. 

First things first…

 

What is data ownership?

Put simply, data ownership concerns the extent to which organizations have control over the (large amounts of) data they generate. Let’s focus on marketing data in particular.

Because marketers use a ton of different platforms and tools to reach their current and potential customers, the data they generate is spread across all of them. That means that the data exists in individual silos that don’t talk to each other, and it’s up to the marketers themselves to put it together, unify it, and find the best possible way to analyze it. 

What’s more, all those platforms have their own data retention policies. This means that if companies are not up to date on all of them, they can lose access to their data after a certain period of time. There’s nothing worse for a marketing data analyst than a dataset with missing values in it.

If professionals were to own their marketing data instead, they would have it to their disposal at all times. They would have the ability to create, modify and analyze data, as well as give or restrict access to it.

Owning their data means that marketers are able to collect it over time, build historical overviews and foresee consumer trends. They can also use it to draw cross-channel comparisons and identify the strong and weak points of their omni-channel campaigns. And that’s only the start.

 

Why a marketing data warehouse?

Recent research by Adobe found that brands are increasingly looking for ways to unify their data. In fact, 63% of IT professionals polled had made it a priority to bring their data into a single, central platform. More than 40% of marketers, on the other hand, are working to integrate their data so they have a more uniform and holistic view of their customers.

A data warehouse is the perfect solution for marketers who want to take full ownership of their data. 

In short, marketing data warehouses are unified destinations for storing and analyzing marketing data. Instead of using data from a single marketing channel for analysis, data warehouses are able to collect data from multiple sources over an extended period of time. This allows marketers to build a detailed overview of their marketing efforts and even more so, of their effectiveness. 

The benefits of owning your marketing data and using a data warehouse to store your data vary from very practical to a lot more high-level. On the practical side, marketing data warehouses provide a central location for all your data and can store it in large amounts for different purposes. It allows for quick and easy data access. What’s more, the data that is in there has already been collected in its entirety, cleaned, harmonized, and made ready for analysis. 

Imagine having to go through all of the above steps for every single marketing platform that you generate data from. In that respect, owning your data and storing it in a marketing data warehouse is quite the timesaver.

 

Centralizing historical data and optimizing campaigns

It offers more possibilities, too. Having access to all of the data you’ve collected over time makes it possible for marketers to look back and draw historical overviews of their marketing performance. 

The more data your marketing data warehouse contains, the more knowledge you can gain from it. Real-time data can help you respond to developing trends, while historical data can help predict customer demand for your products or services over time. VanMoof, an Amsterdam-based electric bike company and a customer of Supermetrics, is a great example of the need to manage data in a smart and efficient manner in order to understand and grow customer base. 

After launching two new electric bike models in 2018, VanMoof saw a huge growth in demand ⁠— and data ⁠— for their business. “The more campaigns we ran, the more customers we had, and the more complex things became. At the pace we were growing, we just couldn’t work like that. We had a big need to centralize our data under one roof,” says Sebastian Mehldau, the company’s Growth Marketing Manager.

Having previously used spreadsheets to store their data, VanMoof turned to Supermetrics for BigQuery to create a marketing data warehouse. This allowed them to centralize and access historical data, manage and grow their bike subscription business, and also create reporting dashboards in various BI tools. In the end, the company benefited from increased speed and efficiency in their operations and gained a better understanding of their customer base. 

 

Catering to a personalized customer experience

The truth is that customers are becoming ever-more demanding about what they want from their favorite brands. They are becoming increasingly specific in their interests and expect companies to cater to that. 

It’s not enough for brands to just stand out anymore so many have already been investing in technologies that can provide a  personalized customer experience. 

With all the tools they have at their disposal, marketers are now able to identify and act on the needs of individuals along the customer journey. Most marketing campaigns take place across social media and other online platforms, and it is crucial to be able to compare the contribution of each of them to the overall outcome of those campaigns. 

You would probably like to know if your ad on LinkedIn brought a lead to your website and then converted it into a paying customer, wouldn’t you? Combine your LinkedIn data with the insights you get from Google Analytics and there you have it. In ecommerce, in particular, being able to map your customer’s journey from the first touchpoint they have with your brand to checkout is invaluable. 

Marketing data warehouses can help marketers achieve that. By having all marketing data in one place, marketers are not only able to identify patterns in the online behavior of their customers, but also evaluate the success of their efforts over time. They are also able to filter through the large amounts of data their business generates and focus on the insights that matter the most. 

And while they have the tools to do that now, marketers will be faced with even larger volumes of data in the future. The way to leverage this to the fullest would be for them to have full ownership of their data, so they can use it easily and in a flexible manner. Marketing data warehouses are the way forward in making this possible.

Psst! If you’re interested in taking full control of your marketing data, we can help. Just book a free consultation with our experts to discuss your requirements.