Tech businesses often hold an abundance of data that could help unlock digital transformation and data-driven insights to fuel business growth. And Software as a Service (Saas) companies are no exception.
Yet, in many cases, this data isn’t utilized effectively or to its fullest potential.
Many SaaS marketing teams have data isolated within different teams or departments across the business, with no consistency in how data is managed or analyzed.
SaaS teams often struggle with taking action based on data insights because of the sheer volume of data at their fingertips. This data overwhelm can lead to delays in taking action and may even result in errors and inaccuracies in reporting and analysis.
Through effective data transformation and data integration, SaaS marketing teams can benefit from effective data management that improves the quality and consistency of data, eliminates data silos, and helps overcome data overwhelm.
Let’s take a look in more detail at how data transformation and the right data transformation tools can help you enhance insights and unlock more value from your business data.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and confused by the sheer volume of data you hold - you’re not alone.
A survey we carried out in April 2022 found that 67% of CMOs felt overwhelmed by the vast amount of data they were expected to manage, and 99% of them mentioned they were managing data from more than 10 different sources.
For SaaS marketing teams in this situation, it’s common to find that a lot of time is spent logging into multiple platforms, juggling huge spreadsheets, and processing data manually. This reduces the available time for meaningful analysis and campaign optimizations that can drive performance improvements.
Confusion around data leads to a lack of clarity in decision-making. It can often lead to missed opportunities through delays in taking action or the inability to generate accurate data-driven insights.
Data integration and data transformation can help SaaS marketing teams struggling with data overwhelm by consolidating and standardizing data from all different marketing sources into one single source of truth.
This allows all decision-makers within your business to make accurate, quick, and timely data-driven insights and decisions that push the business forward.
Another common issue that you might be familiar with as a SaaS marketer is data silos.
Explained in simple terms, data silos exist where different departments within an organization control and manage data that isn’t readily available to other departments within the business.
A SaaS marketing example might be the Paid Search team using Google Ads for reporting but not sharing performance stats with others within the business. The social media managers might analyze all their activity on Meta and LinkedIn Ads platforms — but the rest of the marketing team and the wider business don’t see these dashboards. The marketers managing email might analyze and optimize their results from the data held within Klaviyo or Hubspot — again without others having visibility of the platform.
It’s easy to see how this lack of visibility on data across different channels can lead to a lack of cohesion and collaboration across the business.
But perhaps the more significant side effect of data silos is the inconsistency they can bring, with each team or department analyzing and making optimization decisions on their own data, in their own different way, based on different performance metrics.
Data integration and data transformation play a crucial role in overcoming data silos by centralizing and standardizing data from your various sources so that everyone in the business is operating from the same understanding.
This enhances visibility and ensures that all departments align regarding metrics and performance indicators.
By breaking down data silos and centralizing data, businesses can foster a collaborative, data-driven culture.
The concept of data transformation is best described as converting data from one format or structure into another.
In the context of data integration, where the aim is a centralized, standardized single source of truth, it’s a little more specific. It’s about taking all the different formats and naming conventions from your different marketing data sources, converting them into a single agreed format and structure, and combining them in a centralized data location.
The benefits of data transformation for any SaaS marketing team are significant. Data transformation ensures consistency in the way data is analyzed, encourages stronger cross-team collaboration, improves the understanding of customer needs, and ultimately leads to creating a more data-driven business that can make better decisions faster to facilitate growth.
Yet the effectiveness of your data transformation often depends on the functionality of the tools and technology you use to support the process.
Adverity is a leading data integration platform with one of the market's most extensive data connector libraries and the flexibility to process almost any type of data or format, allowing SaaS marketing teams to collect and transform data from virtually anywhere.
Once your various data sources are integrated, the Adverity platform applies its powerful transformation engine to the data to clean, normalize, and unify it. It does this by joining data from different sources, stripping out the formats, enriching it with additional information, and applying rules to certain data segments to make them easier to work with.
Let’s look in a bit more detail at the things that can be achieved with market-leading data transformation.
Different marketing platforms often have varied ways of calculating metrics or use different date formats, making accurate performance comparisons challenging without standardization.
Adverity addresses this by transforming data from more than 600 different sources, ensuring the consistency needed for reliable comparison, analysis, and informed decision-making in marketing strategies.
Leading data integration platforms often have features that allow the joining of data streams with common unique IDs or values into a single table.
This data transformation can be incredibly beneficial for analyzing performance by product across multiple channels using the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) as a unique ID or evaluating the effectiveness of cross-channel campaigns that share the same campaign identifier in their name.
Joining data streams can significantly enhance the cross-channel impact understanding of marketing performance and aid in strategic planning.
Consistency in naming conventions is important for precise data analysis and maintaining data quality.
Adverity’s Smart Naming Conventions feature helps standardize and enforce naming conventions across each of your various data sources.
This standardization ensures that data from different platforms is easily comparable, leading to more reliable analysis and insights.
If you choose a leading platform for your data transformation, they can likely do more than just standardize data. They can also add value to it.
For example, Adverity enables you to create new dimensions from data, such as splitting text fields by delimiter or creating new fields using features like Match and Map.
This can help enhance the depth and utility of your data, providing fresh new angles and perspectives for analysis and insights.
Having data in a single language and currency format simplifies analysis and ensures consistency across international markets.
This data transformation is crucial for global SaaS marketing teams, enabling them to make data-driven decisions with ease and accuracy.
Visualizing data in intuitive dashboards can be critical for understanding complex data and also allows SaaS marketing teams to quickly grasp trends, patterns, and the performance of KPI metrics.
Once your data has been fully transformed and standardized, Adverity can automatically load it into any data destination, including popular BI and data visualization tools like Power BI, Tableau and Looker.
In the competitive world of SaaS marketing, the ability to harness data effectively can have a major influence on your business success.
However, many SaaS businesses face challenges such as data silos and data overwhelm, which can get in the way of making accurate, effective data-driven decisions.
The key to overcoming these challenges lies in choosing the right data integration platform — one that not only brings consistency and standardization to your data, but also enhances it and adds value to it, unlocking the true power of your data for optimizations and strategic decision-making.
Adverity has a range of features and functionality that can help you break down data silos, streamline data management, and turn data into actionable insights.
Don’t let the potential of your data go untapped.
Discover how Adverity can transform your data management and analysis by booking a demo or signing up for a 14-day free trial.