With so much data to wade through, marketing has become a tricky business. But there’s a modern solution to this modern problem—centralized data. All your data is in one place, making it easier to access, analyze, and maintain. Is this the future of marketing?

This article will explore what centralized data is and why it is essential to the future of marketing. We’ll look at the benefits of centralized data and how it can transform your marketing efforts from the ground up. Let’s dive right in!

What is Centralized Data?

Before we look at how centralized data relates to marketing, we need to know precisely what it is. In simple terms, centralized data is all your data together in one place. To centralize your data, it needs to be collected, organized, and stored in a database and can be accessed using a data streaming platform or through a computer network. 

Data can be better maintained and organized once it has been organized in a central location. Although, this isn’t always the case for businesses that use a lot of raw data, as this takes more organization. Centralized data also creates a more secure environment and makes creating reports or sharing your data easier.

Centralizing Marketing Data

With new platforms being created all the time, digital marketing is constantly evolving. This means more and more data to collect and analyze. This data tends to be stored separately, making it difficult to see the complete picture of your marketing performance.

Centralizing your marketing data makes accessing, analyzing, and maintaining easier. If you want to go a step further, many companies are choosing to centralize all of their data across departments. Of course, this brings up new issues, such as limiting who can access sensitive data. But at least the future seems to be in centralized data for marketing.

What Does the Future of Marketing Look Like?

Consumers are increasingly looking for a more personalized user experience. Therefore, advertisers and marketing professionals are collecting more data to create targeted advertising campaigns. But it’s getting difficult to handle these large volumes of data, especially with concerns around privacy and security.

Big data visualization techniques like maps, charts, and network diagrams make reviewing these extensive data sets easier. But companies are also looking for the best way to collect and store this information to be secure and accessible. This is where centralized data comes in.

1. A Single Data Source

As advertising platforms increase, keeping marketing data from each source in separate places is impractical. Different platforms track and measure their analytics differently, making it hard for analysts to understand everything.

For example, if you wanted to measure the success of your content marketing on Facebook vs. guest posting on a blog, you could compare data using their analytics tools. But the problem with this is that one may rate performance solely on page views. While the other may consider bounce rate.

The main benefit of centralized data in marketing is that it creates a single data source maintained and organized in one place. The raw data from the platforms you are using is analyzed together. This makes it more coherent and removes any discrepancies when analyzing data separately.

2. Removing Data Silos

A significant data challenge companies face is how to overcome data silos. With each department of a business needing different information, it was easier to keep them separate in the past. This has created data silos within each company, limiting each department’s access to each other’s data.

One of the main issues with data silos is that the same information is often duplicated within the company. Needlessly storing extra data wastes company resources. This can also mean that data becomes unreliable. One department could receive updated information but cannot share it with another.

As businesses are learning to use data more effectively, it is clear that we need to find data-sharing solutions. If a company centralizes all of its data, each department can have access to the information it needs. With marketing, the marketing team would also have access to sales figures and updated reports without contracting other departments.

3. Measuring ROI More Effectively

To ensure successful marketing campaigns, marketing professionals must better measure the return on investment (ROI). To do this, they need access to the data required to analyze their campaigns effectively.

Some companies choose not to delve deeper into analytics because they are too complicated. Getting figures from the sales team and trying to analyze data from multiple platforms can get confusing. So often, marketing teams don’t have a precise measure of ROI on advertising campaigns or when branching out into new platforms.

Centralizing data allows cross-channel analysis, which means that marketing teams can look at their advertising campaigns as a whole. In the past, they would have had to look at how each platform performed separately and then compare the data. As we mentioned earlier, this is more difficult as analytics tools of different platforms work differently.

For example, say you run marketing campaigns across different platforms and domains. It can be challenging to get a clear picture of your efforts with some ads running on a Singapore domain registration, others on a .co.uk registration, and some running on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Centralizing and analyzing your data from these efforts will show you where your efforts are succeeding and what needs tweaking. 

4. Reduced Reporting Time

We now live in a world where people want things done quicker, with the same, or even better, results. Marketing departments don’t have time to wait for reports or chase other departments for information.

For example, suppose your company is planning to branch out to a new channel or service. In that case, they might have to wait for market research and reports from other departments. By the time they get this all together, another company may have gotten a head start and left you in the dust. But by centralizing data, your data becomes easily searchable and accessible, saving time and resources.

Many companies now set up automated reports for their centralized marketing data. This could be a monthly progress report or maybe a report on a specific ad campaign. With many teams now working remotely, screen-sharing software from RealVNC or cloud-hosted reporting software could be helpful for quick updates.

5. Improved Collaboration

Imagine a company is trialing its new outbound power dialer software. In the past, the development team would receive the data from the trials and analyze it to see what improvements they could make. They may then create a report to the marketing team to create their ad campaign.

Not only would the marketing team be on hold while waiting for the report, but they would never receive the original raw data to analyze themselves. The IT team may have left out critical information they didn’t need, but the marketing team may have found it helpful.

With centralized data, anyone within the company who needs information would have access to the raw data. The marketing can instantly take the information they need for analysis and share their results. This is how the future of data handling looks.

6. Caring About Governance and Privacy

With the increased use of data to create targeted ad campaigns, marketing teams are handling more sensitive data than ever. So, every company must protect their data. Having a secure, central location for your data makes protecting it easier. It also makes it easier to show compliance with data laws.

Many companies that handle sensitive data choose to use data cleanrooms. Social media platforms, search engines, and other websites want to control how they share their data with advertisers. But what is a data clean room?

A data clean room is a database where companies share anonymized data with partners. These partners have limited access to privacy-safe data, and participants have complete control of how their data is used. This prevents personal identifying information (PII) from being taken.

Centralized Data: The Future of Marketing

So, it looks like the future of marketing does lie in centralized data. With data collection exceeding our expectations, having a system to organize and maintain all this information will be crucial. Centralized data seems to solve this problem. A marketing team’s job is easier when everyone works from the exact blueprint.

With the transition to cloud computing in many of our business operations, centralizing our data seems to be the next logical step in marketing. It works on small and larger scales and gives marketing departments the flexibility they need to create advertising campaigns. With the removal of data silos, access to data will no longer be limited, and you won’t have to spend hours searching through it.

Monitoring security and privacy regarding data collection and storage is also essential. Not only are marketing professionals handling more data than ever, this information is sensitive and personal. Keeping data in one central location allows this data to be protected.

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