Understanding What Exactly Single Source of Truth Is and Why Must Data Marketers Care About It

 

For data marketers that have spent some time in the world of marketing analytics have heard about the single source of truth often think what it means exactly.  Unlike many slangs floating around in their industry, single source of truth is an extremely useful concept, which allows the data marketers to watch their performance very clearly and correctly than before.

What is Single Source of Truth?

 

Single source of truth (SSOT) is basically, a concept which originally derives from the information systems industry.  It is a single place where a company’s data is stored and if required, edited or updated. In this manner, everyone in the company works from the similar record, enabling for reliable, correct reporting, analysis and decision-making across the whole company. 

Having a single source of truth is important for bigger brands and companies which might have many teams and divisions, located around the world, all of them generating their own individual data.

For judging the efficiency of your whole marketing investment, data marketers must be able to see all your performance results together at one place for creating actionable marketing insights and fast reporting on campaign performance. 

Key Reasons Why Data Marketers Tries Really Hard to Create a Single Source of Truth:

 

• Different Data Sources: Nearly all marketing team depend on many different platforms, services and marketing channels. All of those tools have its unique approach to structure the data that it creates. Possibly it tracks a bizarre metric which nobody else does or it formats the dates with the help of pig Latin, which is a huge issue when you require combining the data from a source with data through all the other sources.

 

• Huge Volumes of Data: Data marketing tools produce huge volumes of data. For making the data useful, companies must make sure to collect the data must be gathered and analyzed on-time. Automated reporting tools assist you, but are still time-consuming chore to just integrate everything together, particularly if the data is not set up then, it becomes easy to integration.

 

• Inadequate Time and Expertise: Nearly all data marketing teams are busy with many other projects and because of that they do not get time or training to act as a part-time data herder. There are many software, but marketing single source of truth data is so personal and sophisticated, that just software cannot bring all your data together in a manner which is useful for data marketers.

Primary Approaches to Make a Single Source of Truth for Data Analytics:

 

• Figure Out Your Vital Questions: Data marketers think about the bottom-line impact. How exactly is marketing building value for the business when it comes to sales, leads and final conversions? And in what ways your different strategies, channels and campaigns delivering the desired outcomes successfully? You often oversee marketing for a credit union that wants to boost the volume of new members that are opening accounts. You might also want to know how much marketing requires spending for generating a lead.

 

• Identify Right KPIs for Every Question: What all KPIs will assist you get answers to those questions? Everyone believes that they know what they must be looking at. Usually, companies just monitor vanity metrics as those big numbers looks good, but don’t focus on whether your marketing is actually making an impact on the ultimate goals. Metrics like cost per conversion have to be more important for nearly all campaigns, as it will provide you the information you require for putting your outcomes in context and convey a bigger performance story. Cost per conversion is the KPI which will assist you realize how much every lead costs in terms of marketing expenditure.  

 

• Stock Your Data Sources And Reporting Requirements: The next step in handling the single source of truth data is taking a stock of all the data sources you have to monitor for generating those KPIs. It is very important to find out the frequency of how often you require delivering the reports. A lot of marketing agencies used to give reports every month, which is quite beneficial. You can receive a wider view of performance which evens out any routine swings. Make use of marketing dashboards which are filled with datasets that gets updated daily. This helps you find issues with campaigns early and redirect expenditure as required, as fast as possible. 

And that is a high-level approach to see what a single source of truth can do for company’s marketing. Through bringing all your sales, marketing and media data together in a unified manner, you can make it possible to generate reports for all the company channels and campaigns. As you are storing huge volumes of historical data in organized datasets, you can lay a strong foundation for complex data analysis that involves predictiveness and attribution. Making it a single source having multiple benefits!