Data Orchestration and the Hidden Cost of Data Fragmentation
As a marketer, it’s important that your marketing campaigns are data-driven. This ensures that you not only increase sales, but also reduce churn, which gives you better performance overall.
To drive successful marketing campaigns in a digital-first world, you need data orchestration that unifies all your touch points. Not only that, but you need to create cohesive customer journeys, too.
What Is Data Orchestration?
There’s no one agreed-upon definition for “data orchestration,” but there’s a general concept. It’s where you collect real-time data across all channels and touch points on your customers and prospects.
The most valuable data you can use for data orchestration is first-party data. But many organizations also utilize second and third-party data to search for lookalike audiences. This takes your first-party data and combines it with second or third-party data to look for overlaps.
The result? You market to the “overlaps” since they share key characteristics similar to your existing customers. Therefore, there’s a higher chance of them finding your products or services useful since they “look alike” to your customers.
What Are the Costs of Data Fragmentation?
By failing to unify your data, not only do you lose out on opportunities, but you also alienate your customers and prospects. At first glance, some of the costs of data fragmentation appear negligible, but over time they add up and can create a compounding effect.
Your Departments Are Siloed
The different departments in your company have to work together to create a cohesive business plan. When your data is fragmented, this causes departments to work apart from one another, which can result in disjointed messages. Those KPIs become all that much harder to reach.
Data fragmentation creates a chasm between departments where each ends up using different data points to make decisions without having access to the full picture. From a marketing perspective this creates issues with branding and positioning for the business.
When you don’t have one voice for the brand, both prospects and customers alike can become confused with your messaging. This can result in a loss of their loyalty.
You Won’t Be Where Your Customers Are
When you focus on fragmented data and don’t look at the whole picture, its more likely you will hone in on the wrong touchpoints and channels for customer journeys. Customers nowadays expect to be in charge of their journeys, so you’re there to support, not lead.
When data fragmentation occurs, your customers won’t have support when they expect it. For example, you want to serve ads frequently to stay at the top of the mind, but not so often that you’re spamming consumers and putting them off.
Without data orchestration, you may pull back too much on advertising. Then, when a consumer is at the right buying stage to initiate a purchase, you’re nowhere to be found.
You’ll Send the Wrong Messages
One main benefit of data orchestration is the ability to differentiate between customer and prospect. Also, by extent, the ability to serve ads for new sales versus upsells versus retention.
With the prevalence of marketing fatigue, you don’t want any of your actions to potentially push away your customers. Data fragmentation leads to scenarios where you serve ads at the wrong time to the wrong people and effectively waste precious ad spend.
Consumers want to feel like they’re heard and understood by the brands they trust. If you have the wrong messaging, they’ll feel like you don’t genuinely care about their brand loyalty and will take their business elsewhere.
You’ll Waste Your Marketing Budget
Speaking of wasted ad spend. Marketing spend is always an issue in organizations; when things go south, the marketing budget is always the first thing to be cut down. You want to prove to your board that you can spend their money wisely, but that can’t be done when your data is fragmented.
When you’re only looking at pieces of the puzzle, it makes sense that you’ll only allocate budget to those pieces. Data orchestration ensures that you not only get the big picture, but also that you optimize your budget across all channels and touchpoints.
You’ll Neglect Parts of the Customer Journey
Depending on who you ask, the customer journey can be from the moment of discovery to the moment of purchase (or ancillary purchases), or it can last an entire lifetime so long as the consumer remains loyal to your brand.
Either way, the customer journey is a lengthy one, even if the moment from discovery to purchase lasts just a day or a few hours. The consumer has to go through discovery, consideration, decision making, then upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and retention (loyalty).
With these five crucial steps in the customer journey, you can’t afford to fixate on any particular point and neglect the others. When you do this, you risk losing consumers at any point in the customer journey.
Data orchestration allows you to put appropriate attention on all five parts based on the nature of your product, service, or business. Each stage in a customer’s journey isn’t necessarily equal. Proper data orchestration gives you insight to the full funnel and dissect the stages that are most important. It gives you the data to tweak and optimize each leg of the customer journey to ensure you remain relevant to consumers’ interests, regardless of which part of the buying stage they’re in.
You Won’t Truly Personalize the Customer Journey
The modern consumer isn’t happy with blanket marketing anymore. They can tell when you’re doing it and they’ll be annoyed if you do.
But how can you personalize customer journeys if your data is siloed? Sure, each department can focus on individual parts of the customer journey, but as we said above, if you don’t have a united, overall message, the journey will feel disjointed.
Improve Your Marketing with Data Orchestration
Data orchestration is a vital part of your marketing. Without it, the customer journey is fragmented. This can turn both customers and prospects away from your products or services.
Make sure people complete their customer journeys with you and that you truly connect with them. When you leverage your data, you can create a long-term beneficial relationship that also encourages brand loyalty.