Understand the Data Challenge

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe common challenges with cross-platform marketing analytics.
• Explain how Marketing Cloud Intelligence helps marketers increase transparency, speed, and growth.

It’s a Fragmented World

If you’re a modern marketer, you use different mediums, channels, and offers across many marketing campaigns and conversion points to engage audiences with your brand. To reach and convert your consumers, you employ a myriad of technologies.

Some of these technologies include digital advertising, programmatic ads, mobile, email, social, web, ecommerce, point of sale system (POS), and customer relationship management (CRM). Each conversion point can give you all the data you need to optimize campaigns, make decisions, and report on results in real time. Easy, right? 

Unfortunately, for most marketers, it’s not. That’s because all of the spend, performance, and conversion data within these technologies is siloed, making it difficult to manage and compile. Fragmented, disparate data poses a real operational challenge. 

Plus, the list of advertising and marketing tools grows every year. In 2011, marketers worldwide used a few hundred tools. Today they use more than 7,000. Marketers benefit from all the new capabilities, but struggle to connect the data into one comprehensive view for insight, optimization, and reporting.

The Key Challenge

As a result, marketers lack a single source of data truth—one centralized system of record and insight. Without a unified view of your marketing data, you cannot answer fundamental questions such as: 

• What’s the return on investment (ROI) of all our marketing spend and activities?
• How do we most effectively spend our next dollar, given our business objectives?
• How do we drive smarter marketing decision-making at scale?

The marketing data challenge is well documented. Analysts report that marketing teams are overwhelmed by the number of data sources they must integrate and the volume of data they must make sense of. And business intelligence (BI) tools that aren’t marketing-specific fall short. Marketing data is complex and diverse, and marketers need flexibility, speed, and control.

Meet Marketing Cloud Intelligence

This is where Marketing Cloud Intelligence can help. Intelligence drives cross-platform marketing intelligence by providing one system of record and insight for marketing. Intelligence relieves common marketing pain points by providing:

• One single source of data truth—Integrate all your data from marketing and advertising platforms, web analytics and CRM, ecommerce and point of sales, and more. The application programming interface (API) and clicks-not-code approach, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), makes it fast, easy, and scalable.
• One unified view of marketing intelligence—Quickly surface insights, forecast marketing projections, and optimize campaigns in real time with Intelligence’s AI-powered technology, custom reports, and out-of-the-box dashboards.
• Reporting automation and collaboration—Schedule, control permissions for, and share marketing reports with key stakeholders, partners, and clients. The data is up to date, easy to access, and simple to understand.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence helps you quickly and easily optimize campaign performance, distribute information and reports, and hold every investment and activity accountable.

Transparency, Speed, and Growth

The Marketing Cloud Intelligence marketing intelligence and analytics platform eliminates the time-intensive, manual process of combining disparate data sources to gain a comprehensive understanding of marketing campaigns. With Intelligence, you get back valuable time and bandwidth to analyze data, optimize performance within campaigns, discover insights in real time, and then take action on them. That’s how Intelligence drives transparency, speed, and growth.

Transparency: By providing a complete and accurate picture of marketing investments, activities, and returns, Intelligence helps companies save and reallocate 30% of their budget quarter over quarter. Reports, dashboards, and insights are automatically available, customizable, and can be disseminated to all key stakeholders. And everyone can drill down into the data. Everyone, from the executive to the analyst, has full transparency into marketing performance.

Speed: Analysts currently spend 80% of their time putting together reports and analytics. Intelligence allows you to reinvest that time into insight and action. Quickly derive useful insights from real-time, ready-to-analyze data and dashboards. You can immediately measure, react, and iterate to optimize campaign performance at every level from channels to content, offers, and audiences. 

Growth: Intelligence allows you to hold every marketing dollar accountable. Directly tie campaign performance to business key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the duration of a campaign to view top- and bottom-line results to target. You can then adjust campaigns and budget allocations to optimize performance such as website goals, conversions, sales, and brand health—whatever the metric might be. That allows everyone—executives, marketers, and analysts—to make smarter decisions that increase conversion, purchases, and loyalty.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence Benefits Summary

• Connect, unify, analyze, and act on all your data—using clicks, not code—with one end-to-end solution.
• Gain control with a unified view of your marketing intelligence powered by AI and automation.
• Use a platform that’s laser focused on marketing, including support and a customer community that revolves around marketing.
• Gain an expert partner that can uniquely help you solve your single source of truth challenges.
• Drive transparency, speed, and growth with a powerful marketing intelligence platform.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence is unique in the market, trusted by many of the biggest companies around the world, and now used across every major agency holding group. Intelligence specializes in making sense of marketing data in all its different forms across the ecosystem of brands, agencies, publishers, and other marketing advertising technology vendors.

Follow along in the next unit as we take a closer look at the platform and key capabilities.