Unify your data is becoming a mantra! According to Gartner, a whopping 87% of organizations have low analytics maturity. One of the primary reasons for this is that their data continues to sit in silos even as they aspire to become more data-driven.

Organization-wide data silos prevent marketers from taking a holistic view of their customers. When customer data lives in disparate, fragmented systems that don’t speak with each other, it affects business outcomes. This is the biggest challenge for marketers to drive truly effective campaigns. Hence we are hearing unify your data in every conversation.

As the world moves towards hyper-targeted advertising and hyper-personalized experiences, eliminating data silos is a mandate for any growth-focused marketer. We have penned down how you can unify your data to gain higher ROAS.

Here are four ways marketers can address the problem of data silos  –

Understand and unify your data

It all starts with understanding the state of first party data across the organization. Marketers must consider data collection methods and tools used across the business. To make this simpler, customer data should be thought of in categories. For example, Customer Account Data, Customer Operations Data, Experience Data etc. Naturally, when you have a deep understanding of various types of customer data available, to unify your data becomes simpler.

Invest in a robust modern data stack

Today, with most customer interactions going the omni-channel way, brands have more data than they can handle with traditional approaches. In order to derive insights from these colossal data sets, marketers need technologies that can shorten the “time to insight”. They also need technologies that do not come with prohibitive operational  or skill costs.

So, marketers need a robust modern data stack including pipelines and warehouses. This will enable them to gather data from a variety of sources. Then, they can apply analytics at scale using modern BI tools for better decisioning. Also, a modern data stack is no-code and requires minimal IT investment or intervention. So, it fits in well with the needs of modern marketers.

Get the right data unifying platform

The lack of a unified platform is one of the biggest barriers to eliminating data silos. They also prohibit teams from sharing inter-department customer data and improving marketing and operational effectiveness. Naturally, a single platform puts marketers in control of all their customer and marketing data. It unifies planning to reporting on to a single platform and empowers marketers with no-code or low-code analytics.

So, a relevant, real-time platform allows marketers to bring together and make sense of all customer data including behavior, transactional, operational, online, and offline. Marketers can use this data to steer adtech and martech activities and deliver hyper-targeted campaigns.

Change the data culture and avoid silos from stacking up

We will tell you this – data silos is not a technology problem alone. Instead, it’s a culture problem.

Today, different departments work in silos and don’t find ways to align with each other towards larger business goals. To address this, these various departments must start collaborating better. Naturally, it is important for data-centric organizations to never allow data silos to stack up.

Final thoughts

In this blog, we are not suggesting any radical change in how organizations approach inter-departmental data sharing. In fact, we are simply suggesting a new way to look at customer data. Have a keen focus on deriving sharp insights for better marketing as well as operational decisions. This is especially critical as the era of the third-party cookie withers away and organizations rely more on first party data to make marketing decisions.

Naturally, a top down approach to data collaboration can very well change the data culture within organizations. Leadership teams must advocate data collaboration and invest in the right kind of data platforms to challenge data silos. That is the only way forward for data-centric organizations and marketers.

Want to get started on your journey to break through the data silos in marketing and advertising? Get in touch with us, we are ready for the future with just the platform solutions you need.