What is marketing information management?

In our 2025 Marketing Data Report, we found marketing teams are using 230% more data than they did in 2020. The catch?

• 56% say they don’t have enough time to analyze it properly.
• 26% feel they don’t have enough data to make confident decisions.
• 38% lack the tools to integrate and report on their collected data.

This gap between data volume and effective usage points to the need for a better system. Marketing information management.

It involves gathering, organizing, and analyzing information from various sources, like research reports, competitor insights, and customer reviews, to inform business decisions, enhance campaigns, and learn more about your audience.

Why is marketing information management important?

Generally speaking, marketing information management is important because it helps you better understand your customers' needs and, ultimately, increase revenue. It provides better insight into your business, services, and product offerings.

Incorporating marketing information management best practices and tools provides clear benefits.

Improved decision making

Usually, when I speak to marketing teams, it’s very typical that some are responsible for paid advertising, some for organic social media, and some for the CRM. That's how you get into silos. To put a complete reporting picture together across all of those channels, you need to tie pieces of data from each channel to the other kinds of categories of data there.

Consolidating and gathering cross-channel marketing data will help you:

• Identify target audiences more accurately.
• Price services and products to stay competitive.
• Spot trends in the marketplace so you can get ahead of changes.

Capturing and analyzing marketing management information reporting also helps your cross-functional teams coordinate and align strategies more effectively.

For instance, if marketing data suggests a non-seasonal slowdown in sales, your different marketing teams can quickly pivot, opting to shift focus to social channels or reallocate paid media spend.

Enhanced campaign performance

Collecting and analyzing data on past and present marketing efforts lets teams adjust strategies to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). Reviewing what works, based on A/B split tests and performance of segmented lists, helps you drill down on better performing audiences.

With improved targeting and user journey personalization, marketers can generate campaign strategies that enhance user experience while improving ROAS simultaneously.

For instance, studying customer reviews across different demographics highlights the products your buyers are most interested in. Adjusting campaigns to market those goods and services to those buyers will lead to higher conversion rates.

Better resource allocation

Identifying risks and threats to campaign success helps you better allocate team resources. Studying trends in marketing data highlights key points such as shifting consumer preferences and potential economic disruption. With this information, your business can right-size ad spend and headcount across your campaigns.

Additionally, marketing data may indicate increased demand for a given product. Knowing this, operations could shift resources to ensure production and shipping teams meet orders.

Managing and making the most of your marketing information and data

While individual marketing managers may approach marketing information management methodologies differently, in general, it's widely agreed that the process has four components:

• Data collection
• Data integration and quality assurance
• Data reporting and visualization
• Data activation

Connect data

First, you need to integrate data from different sources, including:

• Internal data: Information from the organization itself, such as customer data, feedback from clients and customer reviews, financial reports, sales data, digital marketing and social media metrics, and product performance indicators. These data sets should include historical and current data to identify trends and behavioral patterns.
• Competitor analysis: This is information about your competitors, such as product offerings, pricing, marketing efforts, keyword rankings, customer personas, and other relevant data that provides insights into their strategies. This information can help you identify weaknesses within your own approach and mitigate threats from the other guys.
• Market research: Industry reports, surveys, polls, white papers, market statistics, economic predictions, data from focus groups, and trend reports are all forms of market research you can use to add context and color to your data collection.

You should automate the whole marketing data integration process. This not only saves time and resources (which can, in turn, reduce costs) but also helps avoid the human error commonly associated with manual approaches.

Marketing information management tools can extract and store information into a repository or database to prepare your data for the next phases of the marketing information management process.

Manage data

Once you’ve integrated all your data, you need to manage it by feeding it into a data warehouse, blending and transforming it for analysis and reporting, and ensuring it follows your data governance practices.

For example, you may blend paid and organic social data to see how your social media campaigns perform. Or maybe you’re a retailer with a brick-and-mortar and an online store. In this case, you must combine online and offline data to see the full picture.

Other ways we see marketers transform their data are:

• Convert cost data into different currencies
• Manage campaign naming convention
• Calculate agency markup
• Calculate ROAS across channels

Read more: Data transformation in Supermetrics: 6 advanced use cases to level up your reporting.

Managing data is an important step to ensure your raw data generates insights and supports your reporting.

Analyze data

Analyzing data through visualization is an effective way to track and communicate your results.

Transforming large amounts of information into data visualizations makes the info easier to read, focus on, and act upon. Think about it: seeing one number with a minus sign (-) and another with a plus sign (+) in a spreadsheet is far less impactful than a chart showing the same information clearly.

From a marketing information management perspective, examples of information you want to visualize include sales performance metrics, website traffic and engagement analysis, click-through rates, and keyword rankings.

With advanced data integration tools, you can see the interaction of related data across your channels in one place, such as conversions for both Facebook Ads and Google Ads.

Activate data

This is where you close the loop. Instead of just focusing on reporting, you can take one step further and push the data you’ve already analyzed and transformed back to the marketing platforms.

Conversions API is an example of data activation. It lets you send conversion data—from your website, CRM, or offline channel, etc.— to platforms like Meta or LinkedIn, provided they have all the necessary rights and permissions. This, in turn, helps you personalize, optimize, and measure your ads more effectively.

How to implement a marketing information management strategy

When creating a marketing information management strategy, it is essential to consider the following steps:

Define business objectives

Define and agree upon your marketing information management strategy's goals, milestones, and objectives. Answer questions such as:

• How do we define success?
• What are our key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• What insights are we hoping to obtain to help us better achieve our business goals?

Examples of information you may want to uncover include marketing strategy successes (and failures), pricing strategy, or trends in the marketplace. Common KPIs may involve conversion rates, newsletter open rates, or leads generated.

Choose your marketing information management tools

Determine which tools you will need for the marketing information management process. Common marketing information management tools include databases to hold and manipulate data, marketing analytics software, data visualization tools, and marketing information management software.

Establish data governance procedures

Establish the rules and regulations your team must consider when collecting and storing information. Government regulations and industry standards need to be considered during marketing information management implementation. Ensure your data architect or owner is aware of these standards and has a plan to remain compliant.

Monitor and optimize

Continuously monitor and optimize your marketing information management strategy using KPIs and data quality tests. Look for issues in implementation, workflows, and processes, and test for data quality to ensure accurate metrics measurement.

For example, different channels or platforms may have different naming conventions for fields like ‘Cost’ or ‘Conversions. Mapping and normalizing these fields and their names are essential, especially as we move into a future where more and more channels and platforms are being used.

Tools to support information management

Information management tools—also known as knowledge management tools—are software designed to help gather, manage, manipulate, store, and report on data. When it comes to marketing information management, the most important frameworks and tools include:

• Data connectors: Marketing automation software used to extract data from a variety of sources, which is then sent to a central repository, database, or marketing platform.
• Data warehousing: Data warehouses are repositories or databases that store data for retrieval, storage, management, manipulation, and analysis. Data warehouse tools are applications that facilitate those processes.
• Data visualization tools: Data visualization is taking information and translating it into a visual medium to make it easier to understand at a glance. Data visualization software allows you to create visuals such as heatmaps, bar graphs, pie charts, and other images to display information in a more digestible form.

Marketing information management best practices

Marketing information management isn't something you do once. It's a living process that grows and changes with your marketing strategy. The following are some best practices to keep in mind as you move into marketing information management implementation:

• Regular data audits: Data quality is vital for marketing information management. Without good data, you can't make data-driven marketing decisions. Be sure to continuously monitor data sources and data integration workflows based on data quality KPIs. If irregularities are detected, review your sources and integration methods until you find the culprit.
• Data standardization: Data standardization involves transforming information into a format that can be processed and manipulated. Data must be in a format that your systems and software can understand for it to be manipulated.
• Effective communication: Stakeholder buy-in is essential when implementing a marketing information management strategy. Clearly defining goals and objectives, related tasks, required resources, risks, and measurable successes is key. Set regular meetings to discuss your data progress, pitfalls, and roadblocks to keep everyone on the same page.
• Regular training: When implementing marketing information management processes, be mindful that team members may require training and upskilling. As processes grow and workflows are redefined, more training may be required. Budget for continuing education and allocate time for training.

Common challenges in marketing information management

Marketing information management methodologies and tools can help you optimize marketing campaigns, reduce risk, forecast sales, and better serve customers, but they are not without their road bumps. Four challenges in marketing data management to look out for include:

Data silos

Data silos are repositories of data that are isolated—whether by design or by accident. While isolating especially sensitive data can be an essential security measure, managing all of your data in silos leads to data loss, poor data integrity, or blind spots in your marketing information management campaign.

This situation can occur for several reasons, including poor interdepartmental communication, lack of resources, and antiquated technology. For instance, if only one person on your team has access to Google Search Console, that's a data silo.

Practicing effective communication, investing in infrastructure, and properly allocating resources are all methods to prevent data silos from occurring.

Poor data quality

Issues with data quality can occur when relying on outdated or unreliable resources. Manual data integration and storage methods also lead to poor data quality—looking at you, spreadsheets.

To help mitigate this problem, implement automated data quality assurance software, follow marketing data governance standards, and regularly test data quality by defining KPIs and monitoring for irregularities.

Integration complexity

Marketing data comes from many, many different places. The number of data sources the average marketer uses to execute marketing strategies increases yearly. Some of these sources are easier to get data out of than others.

This can lead to issues when importing data sources into data integration tools. One way to simplify the marketing data integration process is to use a marketing information management platform with built-in data sources and integration tools, or a marketing information management tool that allows you to use third-party data management tools.

Lack of data driven-insights

Reports are only as informative as the metrics you base them on. Understanding the goals of your business and your marketing information management campaign will allow you to define KPIs that paint a clear picture of the information you're viewing. Using marketing analytics tools and data visualization software enhances reports and makes spotting trends in performance metrics easier.

The future of marketing information management

With leading companies relying more heavily on marketing information management strategies to guide data-driven business decisions, it seems certain that the future of marketing information management lies in marketing software that incorporates machine learning (ML) algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Marketing information management platforms that automate data processing workflows and use AI to deliver data in real time will become increasingly important as industries awaken to their benefits.

Finally, as systems become more complex and the sheer volume of data continues to increase, and as threats rise that threaten data integrity, marketing information management frameworks that incorporate rigorous security measures will become even more important, especially those that rely on AI-security features designed to detect—and respond to—threats as they occur.