The Importance of Customer Data Management for Marketing Initiatives

https://martech.org/how-to-overcome-data-silos-and-fragmentation/

 I'm not sure the extent to which members of our class deal with the topics described in the article above, but I run into them frequently in my day to day work.  The articles discusses challenges associated with mastering and creating a unified view of customer touchpoints. While in class we discussed difficulties with marketing attribution, a great deal of effort is often spent defining the appropriate technology infrastructure and processes to even understand how you are engaging with a particular customer across various marketing tactics.

The article mentions how data from different marketing touchpoints may come from varying platforms which were intended to collect data from particular tactics, not to necessarily create a unified view of a customer across tactics. Some data sources might collect different attributes about the customer, or capture the same attributes differently. A representative from the cloud-based data management company Snowflake describes that organizations generally deploy data architectures to help marketers answer business questions for a need at a specific point in time. However, as these architectures grow and become more complex they, require a reassessment and a revised approach that is more holistic in serving generalized use cases. The article clearly serves as a plug for Snowflake's use as a centralized hub of marketing information or "Data Cloud", but this doesn't necessarily diminish the real obstacles posed by fragmented marketing data.

I work for a life sciences consulting firm that advises biopharmaceutical companies on issues related to commercial strategy. My team is actively working to scope a project for a prospective client whose organization already has many marketing data sources and agencies who produce such data, but which is still unable to develop a holistic map of customers journeys and preferences across the data which it collects. Our project is intended to define a structured approach to assist the client in standardizing the way marketing data is collected and shared within the organization, which is precisely the challenge described in this article. 

I'd be very interested to get perspectives from students in the class on if/how they might have encountered these types of challenges in their own professional roles.