You Ask, I Answer: Unifying Marketing Data?

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You Ask, I Answer: Unifying Marketing Data?

Jose asks, “What is your best advice about collecting data from different platforms? How to unified data for better reading? Is there any recommended tool?”

You Ask, I Answer: Unifying Marketing Data?

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In today’s episode, Jose asks, “What is your best advice about collecting data from different platforms? How do you unify data for better reading? Are there any recommended tools?” There’s a whole family of tools and techniques for this, and what you’re essentially doing is called data warehousing. Data Warehousing involves putting all of your different data in one place in some kind of common format that you can then extract, parse, slice up, and so on.

So there are three layers of data: databases, which are individual sources of data, data lakes, which are collections of data that you pull from individually, and data warehouses, where you distill down what’s in your data lakes into a single location. A real practical example is that you may collect social media data from all these different platforms like Tiktok, YouTube, and Instagram, but you may only want a few metrics from each service. You don’t need all 200 metrics from Facebook, for example, you just need to know likes, comments, or shares. So using software, you would extract that information into a data warehouse. Ideally, the system that you’re using will try to normalize and make it apples to apples so that a like on Facebook is equivalent to a like on Twitter from a data format perspective.

Data Warehousing can come in a variety of different formats. You can completely roll your own with a system like AWS Redshift, Google Big Query, or IBM DB2, or you can take your pick of any of the major technology players that provide these sorts of large-scale data warehouses. There are also off-the-shelf packages that typically fall under a category called a CDP, or customer data platform, in the realm of marketing. These are pieces of software like Treasure Data and Tealium that will automate the collection of data from all these different data lakes into a central data warehouse. These software packages are generally expensive, with costs ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, depending on the size of the implementation.

Depending on the size of your company, you may also have some kind of enterprise resource planning software, such as SAP’s SCP R3, that warehouses not just your marketing data, but your entire company’s worth of data in one location. This can be challenging to work with if you are a marketer, particularly if you’re not a technical marketer. But it is certainly the way to get all your data into one place. Which avenue you choose – a boxed product or service versus rolling your own – depends on your technical capabilities and your budget. If you have a lot of budget, a boxed product will probably be the least painful because you will be outsourcing a good chunk of the technology and the infrastructure to a vendor to construct that data warehouse for you and make it accessible for reporting. If you have no budget, then you’re going to have to learn and roll your own, which means you’ll need to learn how to use a cloud-based data system and how to write code that can interface with the different systems and pull all that data together. That would be what you do if you don’t have budget.

If you don’t have budget and you don’t have technical capability, you should learn the technical capability because it will serve you well in your career, above and beyond just the company that you work at right now. With the ever-exploding numbers of data sources, you want to be able to get to your data as quickly as possible and adapt to the never-ending amounts of change that are happening in any industry. If you’re able to cobble together some code to put those pieces together, you will be an extremely valuable person at your organization, possibly indispensable if you’re the only one who knows how the system works. But the platform and tools are only one aspect of the overall plan for unifying your data. You need to have a purpose in mind, such as what the unified system is supposed to do. You also need talented people who will make the system work, regardless of which avenue you choose. Additionally, you need to have good processes inside your organization that put in good data because the data going into all these different sources is useless if it’s not good. Finally, you need some measure of performance to know whether or not this effort you’re going through is worth doing.

For many companies, a single view of the customer and a single view of your marketing data does have value. If you can look quickly and say, “Yes, we need to spend X dollars more on Tiktok this month,” that’s a decision that, if you have the agility from your data to make that decision quickly, you can have a competitive advantage over someone who can’t look at the data or is confined to looking at channel by channel data individually and can’t see the big picture. That’s really what you’re after: the big picture from all the unified data sources.

So my general advice is to buy or build, depending on your resources. If you have the money to buy it, buy it. If you don’t have the money to buy it, build it. If it is part and parcel of your company’s strategic advantage and your secret sauce, I generally recommend people lean towards build because you want to control as much of your secret sauce as possible. You don’t want a vendor to own your secret sauce or a substantial part of it.

But it’s important to remember that unifying your data is a challenging task, and Data Warehousing projects and Enterprise Data Management are professions unto themselves. Even for the smallest company, these are large undertakings. At Trust Insights, for example, we’re a three-person company, and unifying our data and getting it into one place required a few months of coding to get all the data and make it visible and workable. You need to have really good governance to make it work. But when you do, you’re faster and smarter than your competitors, and you can make your customers happier.

So that’s my advice on collecting data from different platforms and unifying it for better reading. It’s a challenging but valuable undertaking that can give you a competitive advantage if done right.

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