New marketing channels are popping up every day, creating exciting new ways for brands to connect with their audience and market their products.
But these new opportunities are a double-edged sword.
More platforms mean access to more marketing data, which helps to better understand your target audience and optimize campaigns. However, it also gets harder to manage that data when everything is spread all over the place.
As a result, it takes longer to produce marketing reports which slow down the ability to make data-driven decisions, ultimately costing you time and money.
Centralized marketing data solves this problem.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 5 benefits of keeping your data in one place to help you produce more effective reports and reach your business goals faster.
Ready? Let’s begin!
5 Benefits of Centralized Marketing Data
One caveat to centralizing your data is that it’s important to keep the focus on what matters most to your specific objective.
If you store every single piece of marketing data in the same place then it’s going to get real messy, real fast.
So unless you enjoy finding needles in haystacks then you’ll want to set yourself up for success early on.
The best way to do this is to use a report-building tool that automatically pulls your important metrics and KPIs from each marketing channel to create meaningful marketing reports (more on this later).
Let’s start with the first benefit of centralizing your marketing data…
1) Efficiency
It’s true what they say… a sloppy work environment makes for sloppy results. So when data is scattered across multiple platforms it can be difficult to find what you need, when you need it.
Having all your data in one place makes building reports easier and faster. This allows you to spend less time on reporting and more on marketing.
It also makes it easier for team members and department heads to access crucial data on demand. This means they spend less time pestering you for updates, making their life (and yours) easier.
2) See The Big Picture
By centralizing your marketing data, you can gain a more holistic understanding of your marketing efforts.
It makes it easier to understand how your customers move through your funnel and engage with your brand on each channel.
Different departments can also benefit from seeing the big picture if they have easy access to the right data regularly.
For example, a marketing team can gain more insight into the company’s target audience by a sales team sharing their lead information. Or the finance department may be able to better understand marketing’s request for a bigger budget if they can see that their SEO efforts are generating valuable conversions.
It helps make priorities clear for the whole organization and can reduce internal conflict - when everyone’s on the same page, it’s easier to understand the main business objectives and support each other.
3) Keep Track of Total Spend
Centralized data makes it easier to keep track of how much you’re spending across all of your marketing channels.
When you have to log in to each advertising platform separately, it can be easy to lose track of how much you’re campaigns are costing you. This puts you at a higher risk of overspending.
You then have to calculate total costs manually, increasing the risk of inaccurate data due to human error… which also increases the risk of overspending.
By tracking all your ad spend in one place (preferably using a reporting tool that helps calculate this automatically), you eliminate these risks while ensuring that data is always accurate.
4) Easier to Measure ROI
Most advertising platforms let you easily track the ROI of your campaigns, but you are only seeing it in a vacuum.
It’s far more beneficial to view them all together, in one place. This lets you easily identify which marketing channels are producing the best results (and which ones aren’t).
Budgets are finite, so when a campaign isn’t producing good results then it’s important to identify this sooner than later.
Centralized data helps you to course-correct faster and reallocate your budget towards the campaigns that are having the biggest impact on your bottom line.
5) Accessibility
An automated reporting tool also has the added benefit of making your marketing data even more accessible.
When sending reports to your team and clients from each marketing platform you work with, inboxes fill up quickly with emails from different senders - each one with its own way of presenting that data (e.g. PDF attachment, CSV files, links to a 3rd-party dashboard, etc.)
By centralizing your data with an automated reporting tool, you standardize the format of reporting and make it easy to find, coming from just one sender.
How To Centralize Your Marketing Data
When it comes to centralizing your marketing data, there are generally two ways to do it:
- Manually
- Automatically
The first option requires creating reports by hand, but this process is time-consuming and increases the risk of producing inaccurate data due to human error, such as copy-paste mistakes.
The consequences of this can be disastrous. If an important decision is based on wrong data and could result in both financial and reputational damage for your business.
And although the DIY approach might seem like a free solution to this problem, the reality is that you end up wasting hours each week creating reports. When time is money, you shouldn’t be so hasty to throw yours away.
That’s why we always recommend automating the process where possible.
Using an automated reporting tool, you can rest assured that all your data is 100% accurate and is available when required. This lets your team or clients make data-driven decisions with total confidence.
It also frees up more time in the day for you, so you can spend less time building reports and more time marketing.
And for that, there’s no better tool than Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is an email-based marketing report tool that pulls data automatically from your favorite marketing channels, including:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Adwords
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Mailchimp
- And more…
Build professional marketing reports fast with a codeless drag-and-drop editor or start with a pre-built template - no coding experience required!
This makes tweaking reports for different recipients a breeze so that the right person receives only the data they need, when they need it.
But the best thing about Metrics Watch is how your data is shared…
While PDFs and dashboards can be useful, for most marketers and businesses they create an unnecessary layer of friction between you and your data.
By utilizing email as the delivery method, this friction is eliminated. Your recipients can integrate reporting into their busy schedules effortlessly using a format they already know and use every day.
And what’s more, with Metrics Watch, your report is displayed inside the body of the email itself, making it easy to find, easy to read, and easy to access from anywhere.
Want to try it for yourself?
Click below to start your 14-day free trial of Metrics Watch today!
100% risk-free (no credit card required)
Start Your Free Trial Today!And that’s it for today!
This has been our list of the top 5 benefits of working with centralized marketing data. If you’ve enjoyed this post, then be sure to check out these other articles:
These additional resources have even more useful information for optimizing your reporting process to reach your business goals faster.