What A Scoop! Connecting the Right Data Sources to Datorama

Being a good journalist is about more than writing pithy copy or soliciting good quotes. A big part of crafting an intriguing story is making sure you have the right information available. To do that, a well-trained reporter knows which sources have the information they need. They need to know how to tap those sources and distill the information they get into something easily digestible for their readers.

Datorama (currently known as MC Intelligence) does something similar for marketing information: it gathers and collates it in a way that is easy to understand for the marketers using it. But just as a savvy reporter needs to know the best sources of the information he or she seeks, so too do marketers need to know the best sources of information from which Datorama can pull.

Pitching the Story

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is not designed to be an end-all-be-all. Its primary focus is automated email marketing campaigns. Most companies are not just sending emails for marketing and also use other tools at their disposal to market. Salesforce Marketing Cloud doesn’t have a flexible engine for gathering the analytics to take marketing to the next level.

While Marketing Cloud can gather information on how many customers opened or clicked an email, it isn’t sophisticated enough to gather more granular detail that paints a full picture of the end-to-end customer experience. Datorama harmonizes customer data into a single point of truth.

By ingesting and unifying information from several sources, Datorama gives marketers an advantage over traditional measures. It allows companies to tease out why a customer makes a purchase instead of, for instance, just tracking open rates. This gives companies valuable insight into what it takes to convert prospects to customers. But, in order for Datorama to do its job, it needs to be able to siphon information from a variety of places.  

Citing Sources

Sources of data can be broken into broad categories. The biggest of those categories is ad data. High-traffic ad networks like LinkedIn, Google, Bing, Amazon, Apple or Facebook display advertisements. If synced to them, Datorama can pull information from those sites and allow marketers to craft campaigns that achieve a company’s goals.

What business a company is in governs which combination of these sites a company leverages. If a business is targeting professionals, it might make more sense for their business, budget and advertising to focus on it more than, say, Facebook.

Even Salesforce Marketing Cloud would fall under the umbrella of ad data. Essentially, anything that drives some sort of conversion falls into ad data — you want someone to fill out a form, click an ad, follow a link to your website, whatever.

Copyediting

The next broad category Datorama should be pulling from is any that stores revenue data. These sources will include things like Salesforce CRM and ERPs like Netsuite.

Finally, although a bit more esoteric, analytics tracking can also be a source of data. While information from a CRM or similar revenue data cache or data from an ad source will often be sufficient, occasionally getting information from what bridges them can be useful as well. The largest scale source of this type is Google Analytics.

Let’s say a marketer sends someone an email, and the recipient clicks on the link. In Marketing Cloud, what marketers know is that someone opened the email and clicked the link. Google Analytics tracks information after a customer clicks on a website, allowing marketers to know information about the visit (e.g., how long they browsed, the number of pages visited, whether they watched a video.)

But, ad data can also be useful for things other than driving revenue. For instance, harnessing this sort of data can also give businesses better insight into a particular market, allowing them to better understand the needs of potential customers through surveys. Then, the businesses can leverage those responses in the future. Maybe an aggressive click-bait ad drums up sales in the short term but leaves customers dissatisfied with their experience.

Whether it is trying to garner information about a certain demographic or region, such data can prove immensely useful to a business’s growth.

Off to the Presses

Having the right data sources synced to Datorama empowers marketers to know which levers they need to pull to maximize their campaign effectiveness. Maybe your click rate is great, but, for whatever reason, when people get to your website, they aren’t making purchases. This is a problem. Understanding whether your sales pitch is bad, your website is clunky, your payment portal is broken or something else is easier to understand when a company draws data from a variety of sources.

Which data sources to connect to Datorama starts with having a clear view of how a company wants to see its data. Coming to the table with that understanding allows an experienced partner to assemble proof of concepts to achieve a company’s desired result, showing marketing teams how Datorama can integrate before automating the process.

Pulling from various sources requires a company to homogenize the data. Using Datorama to do this is just part of the value an experienced partner offers. While Datorama is not a magic bullet to solve all data needs, an experienced partner can consult a company on how to best set up their attribution model to squeeze the most from the data they have. So, strap on your press pass and don your fedora and curate the right sources for your marketing like a pro reporter.