Everything about the way we do business has shifted from across-the-board operations to more customer-centric approaches. The business sector that has been most impacted by this change is marketing. Marketers are now moving away from campaign-based strategies and are looking for ways to identify and approach individual users.
In order to have the opportunity for a highly-personalized approach, marketers have to resort to cutting-edge technology and be miles ahead of their competitors. In the realm of big corporations and multinational companies, one of the main ways businesses stay ahead of the curve is through data integration.
What Is Data Integration?
Even though this is a term you come across frequently nowadays, it’s important to clearly define it, as well as its potential benefits for your business and profits.
According to Talend, data integration is defined as “the process of combining data from different sources into a single, unified view.”
What does this actually mean and how can businesses and marketers benefit from it?
In most marketing and data departments today, information, stats and analytics come from various sources. Even if you run a small blog, you can get different data from Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, HotJar and other marketing tools.
The goal of data integration is to bring all of them together in order to provide a crystal-clear picture of your audience, better business intelligence and a clear guideline for actions. Reporting platforms like Swydo facilitate data integrations, enabling you to easily create comprehensive, customizable all-in-one reports and dashboards.
Now, let’s take a look at how exactly marketers can benefit from data integration.
Allows Tweaks According To Customer Profiles
When you integrate all your data from various sources, you will receive a much more detailed customer profile than you would by using separate data sources. Without integration, you would either waste too much time connecting these data points together, or you would simply miss out on some important common factors.
With data integration, you get a perfect picture of the profile of your customers, which will allow you to create super-individualized content.
Personalized content and customer interactions are the future of marketing. However, actually carrying out these types of sales and marketing operations is impossible without successfully juggling huge amounts of data and knowing how to interpret it.
Integrating All Software You Have for Streamlining and Optimization
In the previous paragraph, we already mentioned that saving time is one of the perks of integrating data as a marketer. However, it’s not only time that’s saved.
You can also save resources normally spent on introducing software you don’t need. When you have a clear, birds-eye overview of all your data sources, you’ll drop the tools you don’t need and know if there is anything that’s missing.
Onboarding marketers and data analysts is also much easier and cost-efficient when your data is integrated. Just imagine going through a training process with dozens of different data platforms and multiply it by all your future employees. In this regard, data integration can definitely help you save work hours during the training phase.
“If you want to run a business in a way where data is integrated to a high degree, you have to do thorough research before any purchase of marketing technology,” says Miranda Williamson, marketer at GrabMyEssay. “The success of its integration with the tech you already have will prove to be very important in the long run. Before you buy, make sure that there aren’t any hidden integration fees and that the tool will function exactly the way you want it to.”
Creating Different Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps can be a simple way to illustrate complex things that need to be improved in the customer’s purchasing process. The way marketers tweak the customer journey is, of course, with the help of data.
“CJM’s help us identify user bottlenecks, pages and calls-to-action that work and those that don’t. Without having a clear and correct customer journey map, you won’t have control over its changes through an objective and empiric approach”, says Phillip Garrison, marketer at BestEssayEducation.
Using different data sources will allow you to map different customer journeys – where one system will catch a pattern or a structure, another will miss it. When you integrate data, you will be filling in the blanks from all the data sources you have.
Using Data to Improve Your Content
Whether you’re running a blog, website, magazine or an online store, you have to constantly update and improve your content to satisfy the needs of your audience. More often than not, a single analytics tool will not provide you with enough information so that you could form a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t.
Here are some of the tools that you can use as a marketer to improve the user-friendliness of your data after comparing all your sources:
HotJar: an analytical tool that works like a “heatmap” and will show you which parts of your content are “hot” (viewed most often, clicked on or hovered over) and which are “cold” (ignored, not seen)
TrustMyPaper:if you want to improve the quality of your content and attract new audiences, you can use TrustMyPaper’s writer and get a boost in organic traffic
SEO Review Tools: to compare all the issues on your site that don’t serve to attract visitors
Writing Judge: to find writers who can upgrade the quality of the content on your website or online store.
After you make all the necessary changes, data integration will help you measure the success rate of the new content you introduced, so you can keep analyzing it on a deeper level and compare it to what you previously found.
Keeping Up With the Times – There’s More Data Than Ever!
The problem of integrating data from different systems and then exchanging it among those same platforms has been present in the business world for quite some time. In the recent period, it’s becoming even more important, and for a very good reason.
The volume of the total data and information that’s created around the world doubles every three years on average. Believe it or not, if this is true, in the next three years we will produce the same amount of information and data as entire humanity did over the course of its whole history.
This accentuates the importance of data and shows that those who know how to and can manage data properly will have an edge in the business world.
At the same time, not only is data volume on the rise, but also its versatility. There is an increasing number of different platforms, databases, business applications, data formats and standards.
Business information and data is quite often found in emails and files created in text editors and calculators like Microsoft Word or Excel. These files get stored on personal computers which are often unavailable for integration with other necessary data.
Solves the Tool and App Redundancy Issue
A great thing about the blossoming of cloud-based analytical services is there are more tools out there than ever before. For marketers, this means that they can basically access any type of data they want, according to the needs and goals of their company and their overall marketing strategy.
However, when you start reaping the benefits of all these tools and apps and continue to utilize them even more, you and your team can end up with dozens of different analytical platforms and data tools, leading to redundancy and confusion. It also can make switching from one platform to another time-consuming and unnecessary.
This problem is quickly and absolutely solved by data integration, which will allow you to access all these data from a single platform. You will be able to access exactly those features you need and let all your data tools complement each other.
Conclusion
Data integration for marketers is no longer considered out-of-the-box thinking. It’s a must-do for everyone who strives for optimization and perfection. The amount of data available to marketers threatens to override our business systems, making it necessary to leverage reporting and monitoring tools like Swydo to connect multiple platforms and even create custom data connections to control the data and make the most out of it.
Integrating your data will have multiple benefits for your marketing operations, from streamlining and optimization to gain better insights into the customer journey. It will also allow you to enter the world of personalized marketing and run a customer-centric business much more easily and efficiently.
Save time and automate your reporting with Swydo. You can integrate multiple data sources like Google Analytics 4, and Google Ads into one report or dashboard and set it up to run automatically. Schedule a demo or sign up for a 14 day trial.