Creating a single source of truth for marketing data

Challenge 

When we started our marketing and sales transformation journey, we were confronted with the question: How can we work more efficiently and effectively with our gathered data? Each day, we had multiple marketing initiatives running across Switzerland – including webinars, physical events, email and digital ads campaigns, social media, and in-person interactions with clients. Last but not least, our team’s responsibilities spanned across various topics in a rather complex organisational setup. 

Being able to increase the efficiency of our work and the effectiveness of our initiatives, necessitated a new way on how to get cross-channel insights. Our old system of reporting, for example, relied heavily on manual data input and evaluation, which was time-consuming, prone to mistakes, and nontransparent. Marketers had to manually process every data point and evaluated each dataset to pull out important metrics and proofs of performance. Moreover, the multiple datasets were in silos, which further represented a challenge to linking and visualising data. 

Solution 

In order to collect, analyse, and report a massive amount of marketing data in a comprehensive way, we understood that we needed to look for an AI-powered marketing intelligence solution that would help us create a single source of truth for our marketing and sales data. We therefore opted for a streamlined and scalable approach to create more meaningful and easily identifiable insights. 

For the successful adoption of a new marketing analytics platform, a taxonomy was developed that allowed for data standardisation and ultimately enhanced both data quality and utility. We introduced these important building blocks of classifications and naming conventions to establish a solid data foundation. Moreover, it was an essential prerequisite to create a single source of truth. 

With the help of a new data management and visualisation platform, we were able to connect over 15 data sources, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics, through API connectors to house all of our marketing and sales data in a single location. The harmonised and standardised data could now be leveraged to create a complete and comprehensive overview of marketing performance – thus, providing our marketers with the insights needed to make informed decisions in real time. 

Results

In just three months, we were able to adopt the Salesforce solution Datorama and to successfully make use of the benefits that such scalable marketing intelligence platforms offer:

• The use of Datorama dashboards has resulted in seven times fewer ad hoc reporting requests.

• A better overview of our marketing budget allowed us to allocate it more efficiently, helping to improve key KPIs: We were able to reduce the CPCs (cost per click) and CPAs (cost per action) and increase conversion rates in online marketing. 

• We improved collaboration within our marketing and sales team and by increasing transparency gave them a means to leverage synergies more effectively.

With the help of a comprehensive marketing database with unified and structured data we can now set up campaign performance dashboards within minutes. This frees up valuable time for our marketers, who can focus on using the data-driven insights for the development of more impactful marketing initiatives.