In the fast-paced world of modern marketing, there’s an increasing expectation that data-driven decision-making will guide campaign optimizations and inform strategies.
However, many marketing teams struggle to take full advantage of the vast amounts of data available to them, restricting their ability to make informed decisions that drive the business forward.
The reality is that marketing teams are flooded with so much data from social media channels, paid search campaigns, marketing analytics platforms, email service providers, and CRMs that it can be overwhelming.
When data is siloed across multiple platforms, it's difficult for marketers to make meaningful comparisons across channels and understand the bigger picture, ultimately leading to less effective marketing decision-making.
A Single Source of Truth (SSoT) solves this problem.
By bringing all marketing data together into a standardized, centralized, easily accessible location, it enables marketing teams to access a unified view of performance.
This not only helps to address the challenge of data overwhelm, but it also ensures businesses have a trusted source of data that allows them to identify trends, accurately compare channel performance, and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
In this article, we’re going to look at why a single source of truth is essential in today’s digital marketing environment, and investigate some of the common challenges that businesses need to overcome along the way.
The marketing benefits of a single source of truth
1. Improved collaboration across the business
One of the main advantages of having an SSOT is that it enables different departments within a business to work from a shared view of data.
So rather than the paid search team pulling data from Google and Bing, the social media team making decisions from Meta and Pinterest, and the email team using their ESP to guide their optimizations, they all access the same data from the same centralized location, where data is standardized for accurate comparisons.
This helps break down data silos and encourages better cross-team collaboration and alignment, ultimately leading to more effective campaigns and better marketing results.
2. Increased efficiency and productivity
Investing in a single source of truth can also have a significant impact on the efficiency, productivity, and motivation of marketing teams.
When data is in silos across multiple different platforms, it can be a time-consuming and demotivating task trying to reconcile, validate and draw meaningful comparisons from it.
With SSoT data, marketing teams can reclaim valuable business time, empowering them to focus on insights, analysis, and strategies designed to drive business growth.
3. Faster, more effective decision-making
When marketing data is effectively standardized and integrated into an SSOT, it becomes much easier for marketing teams to make fast, informed decisions.
Being able to quickly compare and analyze the performance of different channels and campaigns makes marketing teams more agile and better able to react to opportunities.
Some data integration solutions can even combine data sources within your SSOT to unlock unique insights that wouldn’t be achievable with siloed analysis.
A single source of truth can also be used to power data dashboards with real-time visual representations of your cross-channel marketing data, making it easier than ever to spot trends and patterns in data to inform proactive optimizations.
4. Improved data accuracy and reliability
Businesses typically use ETL tools or data integration platforms to establish their single source of truth.
These solutions often include features for data transformation and enrichment, which help to clean, standardize, and enhance your source data to enable more effective decision-making.
By working with the right data integration tools, marketing teams can have the confidence that they have accurate, reliable, and consistent data informing their optimizations and strategies.
5. A positive step towards embracing a data-driven culture
When business data is in silos, and there are inconsistencies in the methodologies and metrics used for analysis, it’s almost impossible to achieve a data-driven culture.
The collaboration and performance benefits of a data-driven culture can only be achieved if data is accessible to everyone across the business and everyone is working with the same reliable information.
Investing in a single source of truth that all teams can rely on to make informed decisions encourages everyone across the business to use data to guide their optimizations.
The common challenges in achieving a single source of truth
1. Costs and technical expertise
There’s no way around it — setting up an SSoT for your data often requires a significant investment in data warehouses, data lakes, or data lakehouses. Various data storage solutions are available to suit businesses of all sizes, but as data volumes scale, storage can become costly.
In addition to storage, businesses will also need to invest in a suitable ETL or data integration platform to extract, standardize, and consolidate their marketing data.
Another important consideration is to make sure you have the technical skills and expertise within the business to manage data effectively and oversee data governance strategies.
Although many of the leading data storage and data integration solutions are intuitive and easy to use, businesses can often have a smoother transition to a single source of truth by hiring someone with experience in marketing data management and integration.
While these initial costs and requirements may seem daunting at first glance, it's important to recognize that the long-term benefits of having a single source of truth, such as improved decision-making and business performance, often far outweigh these initial costs.
2. Change management
For any business to fully realize the benefits of a single source of truth, it’s important that everyone in the organization understands why it’s being implemented, how to use it, and agrees to use it consistently.
Even though analyzing data from silos is inaccurate and inefficient, for some employees, there may be comfort in what’s familiar and a fear of the unknown about moving to a new way of making decisions from data.
Encouraging the entire business to move away from the status quo can be challenging and likely requires structured change management.
To help overcome these challenges, businesses should consider offering comprehensive training and support for the SSoT for all employees across the business.
It’s also important to openly and honestly explain the reasons for the change so everyone understands why their working processes are shifting.
To help reinforce the message that the change to SSoT data is important for the business, it’s also good practice for everyone who holds a senior role within the business to visibly embrace and promote the move to a more accurate and efficient way of managing business data.
3. Effective data integration
The process of integrating data from various marketing data sources can be a significant technical challenge. If an organization is going to be making a business-wide shift in the way they manage and analyze data, it’s important to get it right.
Any missteps or situations that lead to inaccurate data in your SSoT can undermine trust and confidence in the solution and make the change management process more difficult.
With this in mind, manually integrating data is not feasible for many businesses, as it’s too prone to errors and incredibly time-consuming.
To integrate data accurately and effectively, it's important for businesses to choose the right ETL or integration platform.
The right solution should be able to connect to all relevant marketing sources, transform and enrich data so it’s standardized and formatted to specific business needs, and easily load data into a chosen data destination.
This is where Adverity can help.
With a library of more than 600 data connectors, a wide range of out-of-the-box data transformations, and the ability to load data into any destination, Adverity makes it easy for businesses to integrate multiple sources of data and create a reliable single source of truth.
Adverity also includes built-in data governance features to help ensure data quality and enables businesses to power their SSoT with near real-time data, ensuring that marketing teams always have access to the most recent insights to make their optimizations.
How Adverity helped Vodafone improve its marketing with a single source of truth
Vodafone is one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies, with a strong digital presence and impressive online marketing results.
However, despite their marketing success, Vodafone faced a challenge.
Their marketing data was in silos across 20 different sources, which posed a huge resource challenge for the business, negatively impacted data quality, and made it difficult to compare performance across different channels effectively.
They turned to Adverity to help them integrate their disparate marketing data into a centralized location in their data lake.
By working with Adverity, Vodafone was able to:
- Reduce the amount of time spent managing data by 20%
- Improve data quality by 80%
- Gain a holistic view of marketing performance, enabling better analysis and decision-making
- Improve marketing ROI by 8%
Philipp Rathmann, Senior Data Analyst at Vodafone, summarized his experience:
“With the multitude of marketing campaigns we carry out at Vodafone each year, excellent management is essential - not only for the success of each campaign but also for its efficient implementation and analysis... That's why it was of the utmost importance to not only bring management in-house but also to optimize the data quality and the quality of the resulting analyses. Thanks to our collaboration with partners such as Adverity and AWS, we are now able to do exactly that - and still save massively on costs”
Vodafone's success story demonstrates the power of having a single source of truth for marketing data.
If you want to learn how Adverity can help your business achieve a single source of truth to improve your decision-making and transform your marketing performance, book a demo today.
