Today’s disruptive technologies are redefining the marketing industry, faster than ever. For example, some of the marketing channels that we use today didn’t even exist 5 years ago.

Although, it’s a constant challenge for marketers to keep up, one issue stands apart as the biggest pain point – lack of insights about what’s working across all our channels. And it comes down to how we use and manage data.

Today, marketers have an unprecedented access to tons of data. However, it’s not the volume of data that’s troubling. It’s the fact that it’s scattered across numerous documents such as spreadsheets, powerpoint slides, as well as various marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Adwords, Sprinklr, Facebook, Instagram, Adobe Campaign Manager and many more. It’s a mess that prevents us from gaining cross-channel visibility and seeing the big picture.

This has made it difficult to answer critical marketing questions such as which channels are most effective? Where should we increase, or decrease, our budget? Are we achieving our overall marketing goals? And a lot more.

In fact, according to a survey by Allocadia, 40% of businesses indicated that measurement of marketing data is a challenge, while 9% reported that it’s siloed and ultimately not useful.

Source: MarketingCharts.com

Common Complaints

To deal with the data deluge and achieve omnichannel visibility, it’s essential to unify all the marketing data in one place. This will not only help us manage our marketing strategy better, but also enable us to spend wisely and make better decisions.

However, there can be significant challenges to de-siloing all this data. Here are 4 reasons why marketing data, in spite of being easily available, doesn’t translate to useful insights.

1) It’s difficult & time-consuming to pull multichannel marketing data together. Each source of marketing data can be complex and highly-siloed and can include information about business, campaigns and customers, and lives in spreadsheets, marketing tools, agency reports and business systems.

These data sources don’t play well with each other – they use different units and currencies, and the KPIs and metrics are calculated in different ways, using different business rules. They don’t even have a common nomenclature – for example, what’s labeled ‘Winter 2017’ in one place will be ‘Holidays 2017’ in another.

2) It’s not feasible to get marketers to cut & paste the required data every time you need to run an analysis or generate reports. It’s error-prone, and doesn’t scale. Also, you need to repeat all the steps, every time there’s a data update. So you look into marketing automation tools, which have their own problems. To begin with,

3) Reporting & Analytics are not available to marketing managers. Most data analysis and reporting tools are confined to IT teams, because they’re too hard to use for marketers, who may need to learn scripting languages just to aggregate and normalize disparate data sources. As a result, marketing teams have to rely on in-house experts, every time they need to analyze data or generate reports. This leads to another problem..

Businesses don’t have the necessary engineering or data science resources for data integration. Very few marketing teams have an analyst or a data scientist available, who can customize Business Intelligence tools to deliver omnichannel insights and visibility. So they hand over the data processing part to IT, but then..

4) IT is a bottleneck. How many of you have experienced something like this?

IT: We’ll build you anything you need. What are your requirements?

Marketing: What data do you have?

IT: We have a lot of data. What are you looking for?

Marketing: (After doing some research) We’d like to monitor paid-to-earned media ratio

IT: We don’t have it readily available in our data warehouse. How do you define it? What data should be used for it? What are the business rules for it? Where to find the required data for it?

Marketing: Let me do some more research and get back to you

And it goes on and on for months, if not years.

Take charge of your data

This data challenge will only get worse from here on and the available solutions aren’t meeting the marketers’ requirements. So how do you fix it?

Marketers must develop an automated, in-house capability that gathers and normalizes all marketing performance and spend data – an integrated data platform that transforms data into key metrics (strategic & tactical) and gives you visibility into marketing performance and impact. It may sound daunting but is eminently doable, with the help of data management platforms tailored to integrate marketing data sources.

This will turn siloed data sets into meaningful and strategic marketing assets. Here are 4 ways it will solve your data problem:

1) Single source of data. When you aggregate and normalize marketing spend and performance data, you replace siloed data sources (and decisions) with a single marketing system that’s comprehensive, consistent, and up-to-date

2) Omnichannel visibility. You also get a real-time view of performance across all marketing channels, campaigns, tactics, teams and tools. You’re no longer looking at isolated KPIs such as clicks, and shares. Instead, you have a high-level view of performance based on strategic KPIs such as awareness and engagement, which reveal performance across all channels, for each campaign, segments and business areas

3) Reliable dashboards and reports. No matter how beautiful your marketing dashboards, they’re worthless if they don’t give you the right insights. If your dashboards are powered by unreliable or faulty data, then it may confuse, or even misguide you. Good data governance will ensure that your dashboards are not only engaging but also accurate. It will enable you to clearly understand how your marketing strategy is impacting your business – and gain credibility with the CEO, CFO and key decision-makers in your organization.

4) Better experimentation. Marketing teams are constantly trying out new ideas and tactics. An in-house data platform will allow you to constantly monitor the performance of your marketing experiments and refine it quickly. For example, if you put $5,000 into Instagram campaign, what’s the result? What was the performance before and after the campaign?

Wrapping it up

As you store your performance and spend data every day, your organization will quickly build a rich source of insights about what worked and what you’ve done. It will allow you to quickly compare present performance with historical trends, establish benchmarks, do better research, and make informed decisions.

About the Author: For more than 8 years, Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of BI, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises. He also runs Fedingo blog that covers a wide range of business growth.