Data Chaos to Clarity: How to Break Marketing Data Silos and Boost ROI

According to recent Salesforce research, 80% of IT leaders consider data silos as an obstacle when adopting new technologies and getting insights. It is a huge concern as the same report reveals that 81% of IT leaders say data silos are slowing down digital transformation efforts. 

We live in a digital world where everything is hypercompetitive, and marketers are required to make the best out of everything. Modern marketers are entrusted with many complex yet powerful tools. They have access to various paid channels, sophisticated targeting options, and a flood of data generated from every customer touchpoint.

Yet, despite all these resources and data, many marketers find themselves getting stuck in data silos. When your marketing data is scattered across multiple platforms and systems, it creates data silos. This fragmented data leads to wrong attribution, wasted ad spend, and missed opportunities. Together, all this leads to a lower marketing ROI.

In fact, a study by Invoca found that marketers overestimate cost per acquisition (CPA) by an average of 46% because of inaccurate or incomplete data. 

In simple words, companies are spending more to get customers than they realize, but fewer people are converting. It makes their data look better than it actually is. It can trick teams into thinking their strategies are working when they’re not. 

Therefore, it is critical to address the challenges of data silos to boost ROI. This blog discusses the costs of data silos and how to break them to boost your marketing ROI. 

The Problem of Marketing Data Silos

To reach their customers, marketers often use various channels like Google Ads, Facebook/Meta campaigns, LinkedIn Ads, CRMs, and more. Every platform generates a huge amount of metrics in terms of clicks, impressions, conversions, audience insights, and more. But all these metrics on different platforms are not unified. This data remains trapped inside each silo. 

The consequences of these disconnected data sets are: 

• Inaccurate Reporting: Marketers rely on incomplete or inconsistent metrics for evaluating campaign performance. They don’t get a holistic view of the data. It leads to wrong conclusions, like overestimating certain platforms or missing underperforming ones. Shockingly, 90% of marketers report misalignment in strategies, costing businesses over $1 trillion each year.
• Poor Targeting and Personalization: A customer journey doesn’t have a single touchpoint. It spans across multiple touchpoints. Fragmented data across channels leads to a restriction of understanding of the true behaviours, preferences, and pain points of the customers. Hence, marketers cannot segment or personalize campaigns. 
• Missed Opportunities: Marketers are not able to find trends or cross-channel impacts with fragmented campaign data. It leads to missing chances for optimizing budgets or increasing their customer base. 
• Wasted Time and Resources: Marketers spend countless hours manually exporting, cleaning, and consolidating data from multiple platforms. 68% of marketers spend more than five hours per week on manual reporting. Instead of focusing on strategy and creativity, they are stuck doing repetitive tasks. It leads to a drain of time and resources. 

Altogether, these issues cause a strain on marketing efficiency and marketing ROI. As per IDC Market Research, agencies might lose up to 30% of revenue due to data silos. It ultimately hampers a business’s ability to achieve growth goals. Now, let’s see why breaking data silos is crucial for marketers. 

How to Break Marketing Data Silos and Boost ROI

As per statistics, 47% of marketers consider data silos as the biggest challenge when it comes to getting insights from marketing data. Here are some proven strategies to break down marketing data silos and boost marketing ROI. 

Consolidate Data Sources into One Platform

The first step to effectively break marketing data silos starts with consolidating all customer and campaign data into one unified platform. Marketers should make use of a customer data platform (CDP) as it:

• Collects data from multiple sources like social media, email, paid media, CRM, and websites. 
• Cleans and integrates data into real-time. 

CDP creates a single source of truth, eliminating data gaps. This integrated and accurate data gives clear reporting and better insights. It allows marketers to see a 360-degree customer profile, consisting of a clear overview of the customer journey across multiple channels in a single dashboard. 

CDP is a must to create more personalised and effective campaigns. It is crucial to create a connected marketing system that drives better targeting, measurement, and customer experiences.

Implement Marketing Automation Software

Once all data sources are unified, using marketing automation software will give you the competitive edge. It will tremendously boost efficiency and precision. These platforms use the vast and rich, consolidated customer data to automate key marketing tasks. 

For instance, using marketing automation software, professionals can automate tasks like audience segmentation, personalized outreach, and lead nurturing workflows. Automation is important as it reduces the time and errors involved in manual campaign management. It allows marketers to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right moment.

Let’s look at some key statistics that highlight the impact of marketing automation on ROI and revenue: 

• Companies make an average $5.44 for every $1 they spend on marketing automation. It means an amazing ROI of 544%.
• 79% of companies reported seeing ROI from marketing automation within a year.
• 12% of Companies reported seeing ROI in less than a month.
• Adobe reports that businesses that rely on automation enjoy 25% higher revenue. 

Automation not only saves resources but also ensures that your campaigns are consistently relevant and timely. It will save you the hassle of doing repetitive chores and focus on boosting engagement and conversions. If you want your team to focus on strategy and creativity, then marketing automation software is the key. 

Leverage Omnichannel Marketing

When marketers have a comprehensive and integrated customer view, they should adopt omnichannel marketing. It is a process that gives you seamless and consistent experiences across multiple touchpoints. Imagine having every touchpoint from email and social ads to search, display, and beyond in one place. Surely a great way to boost marketing ROI. 

Omnichannel strategies rely on having connected data to understand customer interactions and preferences regardless of device or channel. It tailors messages contextually based on this unified insight. With the help of omnichannel marketing, brands can: 

• Strengthen customer loyalty
• Increase customer base
• Improve conversions
• Reduce churn

As per McKinsey Global Institute, data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers, 6 times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to create a more cohesive brand narrative. It deepens customer trust and boosts the efficiency of overall marketing strategies. 

Use AI-Powered Analytics for Deeper Insights

It is challenging to convert the huge volumes of integrated marketing data into meaningful actions all by yourself. You will have to spend numerous hours analysing data and extracting insights from it. It becomes more time-consuming when finding hidden patterns in the data. In such a situation, using AI-powered analytics is vital. 

AI-powered analytics tools analyse hidden patterns and trends that you may not easily find. It will provide predictive insights and prescriptive recommendations. No doubt, AI helps marketers in predicting outcomes like customer responses or campaign ROI. It enables marketers to make proactive strategy adjustments according to the needs of the time and resources. 

AI-powered analytics tools also reduce the chances of human bias and speed up complex data processing. With the help of these tools, brands can make decisions more accurately and in a timely manner. These tools are essential for converting raw data into a competitive advantage. 

Let’s take the example of Walmart. The company has successfully utilized AI-powered analytics tools to increase its sales by 15% and reduce its inventory costs by 20%. Similarly, Coca-Cola increased its sales by 10% and achieved a 5% reduction in costs. If you want to make smarter and evidence-based marketing strategies, then using AI-powered analytics tools is necessary.

Continuously Measure and Optimize Marketing ROI

Breaking down data silos enables marketers to get a holistic view and fully attribute results to specific campaigns, channels, or customer segments. Marketers should make use of real-time dashboards for continuous monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs). It will also allow them to respond to shifting trends or underperforming tactics quickly.

Ultimately, these measures should be used continuously and interchangeably to create an agile marketing approach. It is an approach where strategies can be quickly adjusted based on data insights. If one wants to remain ahead of their competition, then agile marketing strategies should be adopted. 

Marketers should consistently optimize campaigns and budget allocation to boost their ROI. All these practices, when combined, will result in fewer inefficiencies and ensure that marketing investments are driving sustainable business growth. 

If you are a modern marketer and want to make the best out of your resources, time, and campaigns, then CM Galaxy should be on your top list. It is a marketing automation software that uses sophisticated AI mechanisms to tackle the problem of fragmented data. 

CM Galaxy consolidates data from Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn Ads, and others into one intuitive dashboard with real-time insights. The result? Marketing teams will gain crystal-clear visibility into which campaigns drive revenue. It enhances targeting precision and ultimately boosts marketing ROI.

Conclusion

Marketing data silos plague many organizations, but are curable. It is true that data silos force teams to work through inefficient manual processes and guesswork. It leads to limited data insights, weakens targeting, and slashes ROI. To cure such a plague or to solve this problem, marketers must unify their data through a customer data platform. 

Breaking down marketing data silos is possible when all the above-mentioned strategies are combined properly. Marketers should use MarTech platforms like CM Galaxy to break free of data silos and boost marketing ROI effectively. By using emerging tools and technologies in marketing strategies, marketers can make faster and smarter decisions.