In today’s globally competitive business environment, companies must do everything they can to attract customers. Marketing can be broadly defined as the efforts you make to reach out to customers to 1) ensure they are aware of the products or services you offer, and 2) to encourage them to purchase from you. This is a huge business area that can include all types of advertising, search engine optimization, traditional communication campaigns, and much more.
Over the past several decades, marketing strategies have changed dramatically, becoming much more complex. To create the most effective marketing system, companies are compelled to gather as much data as possible to drive information-based decisions. For most of these companies, the use of marketing data warehousing is effective in developing this process.
What is Marketing Data Warehousing?
A data warehouse is a technological infrastructure where information can be gathered, formatted, and stored for future use. Companies can bring together data from reporting, historical analysis, transactions, invoicing, and other sources into one convenient place. That data can then be pulled out and analyzed by systems and employees to accomplish tasks.
A data warehouse can be used for several activities and is most commonly associated with an overall business intelligence strategy. A growing number of companies, however, are creating data warehouses specifically to serve their marketing efforts. This approach allows them to select what information should be fed into the system, so it is more focused and useful to those who need to access it.
As with any data warehouse, this type of system requires massive storage capacity so that all relevant information can be added and stored. This way, a marketing team can pull out the data they need from many sources and across an extremely long historical timeline.
Benefits of Marketing Data Warehousing
Creating a marketing-specific data warehousing platform will provide many benefits for your entire organization as well as for the marketing department specifically. Some of the most significant advantages include:
Nearly limitless storage – Data warehousing on cloud infrastructure provides virtually limitless amounts of storage, so companies do not have to exclude any information that may be useful.
Accessible by analytics programs – Data can be easily accessed by advanced analytics programs to help create actionable reports to inform data-focused marketing decisions.
Full ownership of data – The marketing team can maintain full ownership of the data rather than relying on other departments to house and provide as needed.
Fed from multiple data sources – Data integration from multiple different sources is fast and easy.
Low or no maintenance – From a technological point of view, there is not much maintenance action required. Using data warehousing services, you can also lean on third-party experts to support the system.
Establishing a data integration process
When creating a marketing data warehouse, a lot of attention is paid to establishing the initial infrastructure to support the system. While this is certainly important, it is also critical that the data integration services are expertly planned out. Taking the time to identify all the sources that will feed information into this platform and ensuring that they have the proper processes to do it, will ensure that data warehouse can be used effectively.
Since information is fed into this type of system from various sources, both internal and external to the company, a great deal of work is required. Many organizations will partner with data warehousing services to not only plan out how the system will be set up, but also how the data will be provided. Data integration services can identify all sources of data that are needed, and make sure they are configured in such a way as to send the desired data to this platform as it is generated.
Marketing data warehousing consultants
No doubt creating this type of system, and configuring other platforms to send data to it, can be complicated. Trianz consultants are experienced not only when it comes to the technical side of this process, but also in helping companies effectively leverage data for marketing purposes. Whether you are looking to set up a new marketing data warehouse on cloud infrastructure, or modernize an existing system, Trianz is here to help.
Schedule a consultation with a Trianz consultant to learn more about these systems and how we can help you accomplish your marketing goals.
