Marketing Data Platform Explained: Everything You Need to Know

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Here’s the thing — marketers need accurate insights to build targeted campaigns and hit the right mark. They need in-depth details about the impact their marketing campaigns are making to know exactly where the budgets should be allocated in order to drive the best results.

But if you are already using over half a dozen marketing tools and technologies with different features and siloed analytics data, it can be difficult to make sense of all the data thrown your way and drive insights that can accurately measure customer behavior, engagement, and interactions. 

This is exactly where marketing data platforms can help. By integrating data from numerous sources, marketing data platforms can give you a clear overview of your audience and campaigns, and in turn, allow you to create profitable and precise marketing activities.

Also Read: Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Attribution Models

What is a marketing data platform? 

A marketing data platform can be referred to as a technology stack or a holistic platform that manages all the available customer and marketing data across different channels and media. 

The goal of a marketing data platform is to create a unified dashboard that can enable advanced analytics, marketing efforts, audience creation, and KPI measurement. It provides marketers with a single view of all of their marketing activities by combining data from multiple sources and extracting insights through AI solutions. 

Marketing data platforms are designed to identify valuable insights and increase the agility of marketing campaigns. They help pinpoint the next best steps that marketers can take to target their customers accurately, increase conversations, and stay ahead of the curve.

Moreover, when your marketing team doesn’t have to spend precious time and effort scouring through data and creating manual reports, they automatically have more time to enhance customer experiences and develop creative marketing campaigns.

The core components of a marketing data platform

#1. Collect

The marketing data platform collects data from several sources like website analytics, product analytics, CRM, and ad tools. The data is collected based on unique identifiers of every source including cookies, sessions, email addresses, and names. 

#2. Unify 

The marketing data platform uses the unique identifiers to unify siloed data from different platforms and in turn, give you access to user-level data. This in turn allows marketers to identify and track users logged in from multiple devices, deduplicate available customer data, and match existing customer information to third-party user data. 

#3. Analyze and segment

Just unifying all the data is not enough. You need to segment the available user data in order to get actionable insights from it. Marketing data platforms can effectively segment data and make it easy for marketers to analyze and understand underlying trends and patterns through easily visual and shareable reports.

The need for marketing data platforms

Digitization has transformed every industry in its own way and that includes the marketing industry as well. Marketing and sales technology is now extremely targeted, power, ubiquitous, and of course, very expensive. In fact, organizations now spend upwards of 29% of their total marketing budget on technology, which broadly includes infrastructure, software, and data to track, analyze, and optimize marketing activities.

These technologies can include but are not limited to website analytics and management, marketing automation tools, CRM (customer relationship management) platforms, email marketing, product analytics, data warehouses, and more. Each of these tools come with their own set of features and data analytics capabilities. 

While you can get access to analytics, dashboards, and reports from all of these tools separately — the data in them is siloed. 

• With website analytics tools, you only get access to website viewer data and behavior. 
• With CRM tools, you only get access to the overall customer journey. 
• With social media marketing tools, you only know which posts the users interacted with and what website page they landed on. 

You don’t get a clear view of how the users interact with the different pages of the website or how long it takes for them to convert. The siloed data not only makes you more confused but it can actually lead to wrong analysis and insights — You may end up putting more money towards campaigns that aren’t directly leading to any conversions and ignoring campaigns which actually help you get more sales.

Enter the marketing data platform.

Marketing data platforms can integrate data from different marketing tools and give you a more granular understanding of how users interact with your website, marketing campaigns, and products.

Optimize sales and marketing funnels with a marketing data platform

While sales and marketing technologies multiply and change rapidly with every passing year, the main data element of sales and marketing do not change. Of course, new data elements are often added as new digital channels for customer interactions are introduced, but the basic data elements like acquisition, attribution, engagement, and conversion don’t change. A marketing data platform will not only provide you with all these elements but will also provide you with the ability to:

• Stitching of data across platforms such as FB, AdWords, analytics, CRM, etc. Providing you with a true and complete picture always
• Fetch error-free unsampled data with just a few clicks, in less than a minute
• Create dashboards for daily monitoring, generating insights, and taking key marketing actions
• Make hourly, daily, weekly unique reports based on requirements, unique with respect to each user persona (CEO, CMO, DM Head, Analyst, etc.)
• Create relevant customer segments for budget distribution and retargeting
• One-stop view for everyone in the organization for marketing data

No matter what technologies you use or what data elements you want to track, a marketing data platform can make sense of all the data and serve as the single source of customer truth by unifying all the data together. Embracing and introducing a marketing data platform to your suite of digital tools means that you can finally understand the end to end customer journey at a more microscopic and granular level.

Why Easyinsights is the most powerful Marketing Data Platform out there

Easyinsights is the most intuitive platform to discover immediate actionables to grow your business. It combines Ad costs & clicks, app analytics, website conversions, and CRM data to get the complete picture of your marketing performance. This becomes the single source of truth for your entire digital marketing team. 

It also integrates with all the digital marketing data sources like Google Analytics, Branch.io, Appsflyer, Google ads, Facebook ads, Apple Ads, Shopify, Magento, Zoho, Salesforce, and hundreds of other tools and databases seamlessly. It brings your siloed data together required for all the key analyses done by the industry leaders after deploying heavy engineering teams. 

You can access all the data from the preferred BI tool of your choice be it Google sheets, Tableau, or Data Studio. Providing you with all the above-mentioned benefits, accessing clean data, and analyzing it will become so easy, that your teams will truly become data-driven. Wanna see Easyinsights in action, request a demo now!