Marketing analytics and the hurdle of data engineering

Marketing leaders understand the importance of analytics and know it depends on complex data engineering. To conduct incisive funnel analysis and continually optimize customer experience, marketing teams need access to accurate customer data from every key source, centralized in a single environment and prepped for analysis. That’s a major engineering challenge, because customer data comes from multiple sources, many featuring custom objects, and application APIs and database schemas continually change.

To meet that challenge, you’ll need a data engineering team with enough bandwidth to focus on marketing needs. Otherwise, you’ll find it difficult to build a competitive analytics program. In terms of funnel analysis, you’ll likely find it difficult to:

• Reliably target prospects
• Accurately analyze campaign ROI, including connecting ad spend to closed deals and attributing leads
• Anticipate business outcomes by leveraging source data to drive predictive models

In terms of customer experience, you may struggle to:

• Understand and optimize the customer journey and nurture process
• Improve the product and support experience

Powerful and effortless analytics for marketing teams

Automating the data integration process means that neither marketers nor data teams have to worry about data engineering — data just arrives in the warehouse, ready for analysis. You can meet all of the analytics goals above without building or maintaining data connectors. Depending on your business intelligence (BI) tool, even non-technical team members can analyze customer data.

Fivetran enables this by:

• Centralizing all customer data into any cloud data warehouse
• Continuously syncing data from every source
• Automatically adjusting to API and schema changes
• Detecting and replicating custom objects
• Seamlessly integrating with your favorite BI tool

With accurate customer data in place, marketing teams can:

• Precisely segment customers and design highly targeted advertising campaigns
• Create real-time ROI and attribution reports, sharing insights from the latest customer data and matching ad spend to closed business
• Develop reliable forecasts based on analysis of up-to-date customer data from every source
• Optimize marketing programs, products and services by generating comprehensive insights into customer behavior and the customer journey

Marketing successes in the real world

Many Fivetran customers have realized these kinds of benefits and reduced data engineering costs in the process. DiscoverOrg, for example, used Fivetran to centralize data from 10 siloed applications into its cloud data warehouse. By combining that data with its production data, the company gained a 360-degree view of the customer journey for the first time. Without Fivetran, it would have taken three full-time engineers to build and maintain the requisite data pipelines. DiscoverOrg also used Fivetran to combine its own Salesforce data with the Salesforce data of a recently acquired business, enabling it to create a lead-routing algorithm that increased average contract value by 80-90%.

To learn more about how Fivetran automated data integration helps marketers and advertisers meet key business challenges, check out this collection of case studies. For more resources or technical details about deploying Fivetran marketing connectors for your business, reach out to sales@fivetran.com.

Automate your marketing analytics

Marketing teams can use automated data pipelines to facilitate key goals like precise targeting, accurate lead attribution and maximal campaign ROI.

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