When customer data is siloed, marketing suffers. Break these barriers and drive better insights, efficiency and cross-team collaboration.
Marketing relies on seamless access to data, but customer information is often trapped in silos across teams and platforms. As a marketer, you’re uniquely positioned to drive change by bridging gaps between teams and aligning data strategies with business goals. Here are five actionable ways to break down silos and maximize your marketing impact.
Why marketers are key to breaking down data silos
The impact of data silos on businesses is well-documented through surveys with CMOs and marketers. It is a major concern for both business and technical stakeholders.
Regardless of why they exist, marketers can play a key role in removing them by building strong business cases that highlight the benefits of integration — such as improved martech utilization, streamlined marketing processes and enhanced customer engagement. This helps businesses understand its full impact on organizational goals and allocate resources to multidisciplinary teams (i.e., IT, operations, legal and customer brand) for dismantling them.
You are uniquely positioned to lead this effort as someone who:
- Works across multiple customer-facing channels.
- Has direct insight into how customer data is collected and used.
For example, consider a company that wants to identify which data sources bring in new customers who make a high number of purchases within their first six months. It also wants to track whether these customers have submitted support tickets post-purchase.
This requires combining marketing (acquisition) data with sales and customer service data — often stored in separate platforms. If data is disconnected, the company may struggle to determine which acquisition channels drive the most purchases and customer support interactions, leading to missed insights and inefficiencies.
Addressing data fragmentation is not just a technical challenge – it’s a business imperative. Here are five key ways you can drive change within your organization.
1. Build business cases that highlight the cost of data silos
Develop use cases aligned with overall business objectives to demonstrate how customer data silos hinder their success. Quantify the lost opportunities and show how breaking them down benefits the company.
For example, without unified data, it’s impossible to determine which acquisition channel performs best in driving purchases or generating customer support tickets. This lack of insight prevents informed budget allocation and reduces marketing efficiency.
2. Map how customer data moves through the martech stack
Take a systemic view of how customer data flows through the martech stack to identify where issues exist. Pinpoint how they restrict process improvements and negatively affect customer engagement and metrics.
For instance, is customer data being collected in platforms not yet integrated with the martech stack, such as a disconnected customer support platform? If so, determine how this data can be consolidated with other data points and identify the best process for achieving this integration.
3. Use connected data to improve marketing efficiency
Eliminating customer data silos improves marketing efficiency by enabling quick use of conversion data in campaigns, such as reducing cost per acquisition in paid media. Collaborate with other teams responsible for customer data to devise processes that bring these data points together.
While you don’t have to handle data integrations directly, help other teams understand the importance and benefits of sharing data and facilitate the process.
4. Promote cross-team collaboration for better customer insights
Encourage collaboration across teams to define which data fields should come from each data source, enhancing customer experience and improving marketing processes. By addressing the points above, you can establish a framework for integrating customer data, enabling teams to effectively answer key questions about customer engagement and conversion.
5. Champion data transparency and share insights across teams
Take the lead in promoting un-siloed customer data by ensuring teams share results, insights and successes. Be ready to explain this approach, including its challenges, benefits and outcomes, to leadership and stakeholders from other teams.
Make sure insights are shared across teams and tied back to the relevant use case. For example:
- Was the company able to analyze acquisition channels by customer purpose and support tickets?
- Did any insights emerge to improve acquisition efforts?
- What plans are in place based on these findings?
Also, address these key areas:
- Data privacy: Ensure all customer data is handled according to the company’s privacy policies.
- Data governance: Record relevant customer data points and their locations in a governance document, shared across teams to clarify how the data should look, where it resides and how it can support overall business goals.
Collaborate with other teams and martech vendors to drive these efforts forward. By fostering alignment around shared goals, you can help build the case for breaking down data barriers and illustrate the tangible benefits of doing so — from improving ROI to uncovering actionable insights and setting clear next steps for integration.
The post 5 things marketers can do to abolish data silos appeared first on MarTech.
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