Why You Should Be Analyzing Your Marketing Stack

As an enterprise marketer, you have outreach and lead generation efforts spread across dozens if not hundreds of channels. From paid advertising to customer relationship management to marketing automation and beyond, your tool set or marketing stack helps you conduct, measure and continuously improve your efforts.

However, if you’re not harvesting and analyzing the data from these disparate systems, how do you know, truly, which marketing avenues and campaigns are winning?

Marketing's changing times

Marketing has evolved greatly in the last ten years. Job titles such as Marketing Director, Marketing Manager, Growth Manager and so on are expected to intelligently report success metrics of all their efforts. This means marketers need to know how to infer data trends, adapt to changing marketplaces, and perhaps know a little SQL or be an Excel ninja to adequately report back to the rest of the business. In many enterprise companies, marketing is a leading data-driven department.

The data challenges of a marketing stack

Components of a marketing stack often include built-in reporting. Tools such as Salesforce, MailChimp, Google Search Console, Clearbit and others have business intelligence capabilities including dashboards and trendlines. These reporting tools are a good starting point, but today’s savvy businesses analyze data across tools and mediums to report back on questions such as:

Which social ads translate to the highest sales conversions on our Shopify site?
How many touches on content does it take to guide someone down our sales funnel?
Which event types are providing our sales team with the most qualified leads?

As a company’s data maturity grows, so do the pains of managing multiple campaigns and efforts. Other issues arise such as data accuracy, up-to-date data, engineering time and reliance upon corporate IT for data transfer mechanisms or ETL.

The promise of automated data integration

Data engineers and analysts know the joys of automated data pipelines. However, this might be a new concept to marketers who are used to copying and pasting into spreadsheets, known as “Excel hell.”

By now you know the concept of a marketing stack. Also, you likely have a data stack that you’re using on a regular basis as well. Do you use Tableau, Looker or Chartio to visualize and share marketing/reporting data? There’s a missing piece -- a data pipeline that can handle routing all your marketing data into a centralized place for easy visualization and analysis. The best part? Setting it up is easy and can be done in a matter of minutes -- and by doing so, you’ll have constantly up-to-date information to report on and draw insights from.

Fivetran is the leader in automated data integration, and we have more than 150 connectors (data sources) including Salesforce, NetSuite, LinkedIn Ads and more to easily manage and secure your marketing data in one place. So, no matter your marketing platform, we’re your data utility that provides always-on access to data -- as simple and reliable as electricity.