As a modern marketer, you communicate about your brands across different regions, channels and campaigns, every day. From the point of view of your customer journey, you’re engaging with the consumer on a variety of channels, including mobile, programmatic, email, web, point of sale (POS), customer relationship manager (CRM) and e-commerce. By definition, you’re using a lot of different technologies to do this.
For most marketers, this includes one -- or more -- major marketing cloud suite plus a myriad of other point solutions to manage your day-to-day marketing, advertising and consumer engagement.
Bringing all of the data together from disparate sources and into one centralized view has presented a real operational problem. For marketers, it’s been extremely challenging to get their data unified with legacy technology, such as business intelligence tools. The volume, speed and rate of change overwhelm the typical business intelligence (BI) solution. On the business side, many marketers have operated without consistent key performance indicators (KPIs), a lack of real-time information and a persistent need to manually wrangle data to report and gain insight. Great divides have existed across the major pillars of marketing data.
But that’s changing as we speak.
An emerging category and technology is moving into the mainstream, and it’s being leveraged by the Fortune 500 and thousands of other early adopters. It puts marketers in control of their data and takes aim at the marketing challenges they confront with measurement and insight across the organization.
Let me introduce you to the new vocabulary:
Marketing intelligence is a category of marketer-friendly, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, domain-specific technology for marketers to manage data, analytics, visualization and activation across a single source of truth.
Single source of truth refers to one unified view of data, agnostically integrated from the myriad of technologies used in today’s marketing and consumer engagement ecosystem, for the purpose of smarter insights, intelligence and activation across the entire customer life cycle.
Marketing data integration and harmonization is an automated approach in marketing intelligence for marketers to connect and unify data from disparate sources -- combining application program interfaces (APIs), AI-enabled data collection and industry standard data models to standardize taxonomies across different sources.
Automated data visualization, insight and activation are new capabilities within marketing intelligence for marketers to make their single source of truth accessible, interactive and actionable. The end goal is to optimize marketing’s performance, business impact and customer experience in the moment -- while building a store of knowledge and insight for the long term.
Marketing intelligence and the single source of truth are revolutionary ideas for marketers because they take capabilities that were traditionally under IT’s purview and put them in marketers’ hands. But what it enables from a business perspective is even more profound. It means having access to complete and accurate data, insights and analytics to answer the fundamental questions in marketing:
• What is the return on investment (ROI) of every marketing activity and spend?
• Which investments and activities will we collectively optimize today to improve business impact?
• Is every decision in the organization being made more intelligently with data?
There will never be one single data source that can answer these questions, nor are these questions the sole responsibility of any one marketer within the organization. This, thereby, makes marketing intelligence and the single source of truth transformative.
On the data side, it simultaneously supports the need for granular and holistic insight. On the business side, it simultaneously supports individual and collective accountability and collaboration. That's just what modern marketing needs: leadership that can dynamically manage strategy and investment on a global scale to drive growth. And the marketing organization, as a whole, can optimize every activity and spend in support of business goals.
The vision has always been there. Marketing intelligence and the single source of truth provide the technology and playbook to make it real. As we begin the second half of 2018, look for these trends, as they will likely become top of mind for marketers.
