There are beasts and demons lurking in the dark reaches of your company’s marketing programs and they’re keeping you from successfully turning your data into campaign success.

We’ve all faced them—the heaps of data that don’t drive actionable insights, the out-of-date identifiers that hamper targeting, the confusing array of marketing tools that never seem to deliver the needed results. These monsters are crafty, and they hide in your people, processes and technologies. Their actions are sometimes hidden but are always frightening and insidious.

Think about it. Are you moving ahead aggressively to use first-party data only to find that what you think you should know about your customers is unorganized and siloed across your organization? That’s a data colossus that needs to be tamed.

Maybe you’ve found that the infrastructure you have in place to deliver real-time insights is operating a lot more slowly than you had expected. Perhaps a sorcerer has conjured a spell that needs some kind of taxonomy charm to break it.

Okay, it’s not really magic, but many companies do need to take concrete steps to ensure that their data is accessible, enriched and actionable.

More and more organizations are turning to customer data platforms (CDPs) as a strong line of defense against these data monsters. According to Treasure Data/Advertiser Perceptions research, currently 63% of marketers are using CDPs to personalize digital campaigns and unify data and customer profiles. Another 60% use CDPs to map out customer journeys.

So, gather your power-ups and find out more about the ways to defeat some of the most menacing monsters sneaking into your company’s data strategy.

When people within your organization don’t have access to the same set of comprehensive data—or are working off skewed data—roadblocks arise that can slow a campaign down or send it off in the wrong direction.

Data access is a huge challenge. It’s not unusual for people in different departments, in different regions, or managing different brands or products to not have access to the same customer data and insights. All this can come from keeping data on different systems that can’t communicate with one another, limiting access to data, or even because of privacy regulations that differ by region or country.

This is the work of the Data Gatekeeper, whose primary means of slowing you down is storing data in different siloes and limiting access to it. 

And many companies suffer at the hands of this fiend. Treasure Data research found that 28% of data management pros said their customer data was siloed across multiple systems and organizations; many were stuck using legacy data storage systems. Just 36% said they can organize customer data from a unified database. You can see why many marketers find they are struggling to fully organize, analyze and activate their customer data.

So, what slays the Data Gatekeeper?

Eliminating siloed data and making consumer information available across your organization’s marketing operations is the solution to partitioned, legacy systems that hold your data behind walls. Placing all the data you have onto a singular storage space—a data lake—is the first step to activating what we like to call the Smart Data Access Boost.

But there’s more. Being able to store every shred of information your organization has on every individual consumer and market you’ve come across is all very well and good, but it’s worthless if you don’t have a way to organize it. That’s why a Smart Data Access Boost takes advantage of a CDP to activate your data and deliver insights and intelligence. This is essential for personalized outreach or to create personas that go beyond simple audience demographics.

At the Top of Its Game

AB InBev had to face down a Data Gatekeeper. The beverage giant supports a roster of more than 500 brands like Budweiser, Corona and Beck’s across more than 40 countries. But its operations were suffering from siloed data covering over a thousand different data sources and more than 70 million unique customer records.

Putting a smart CDP at the center of its mar-tech stack was a critical step to solving this challenge. AB InBev broke down silos to integrate all its data, including more than 70 ecommerce sources and sites, for a total of 70.1 million unique records. This includes 4.3 million unique direct-to-consumer records that now fuel the company’s emerging DTC business.

Once democratized, the company’s marketing personnel could access granular insights related to purchase behavior using easy-to-understand dashboards and segmentation features that make it a breeze to find new customers and keep existing ones.

The faster you can get your hands on new information, the faster you can get it to work for you. But you also must ask yourself how accurate your data is. Slow-streaming and inaccurate data is the calling card of The Data Delayer—a devious gremlin made up of unintelligent processes that blur data through lack of detail.

One of the Data Delayer’s calling cards is turning one consumer into multiple duplicate profiles. Without a unified customer ID, you’ll find your view of the customer journey is hazy, your marketing spend is wasted and your metrics are inaccurate. You’ll never be able to personalize your messaging because you simply don’t know who that person really is.

And if you can’t identify people, you can’t engage them in the right way. This is how the Data Delayer slows your marketing down. You won’t know whether the touchpoints and interests of the consumer you’re targeting are on point. That will make it harder to know whether you’re matching audiences with the content and products that they actually want.

The Data Delayer feeds off out-of-date data, and there’s one way to eliminate it for good.

The fastest way to get rid of the roadblock that is The Data Delayer is to overwhelm it with the power of The Optimizer. The Optimizer’s powers are many, and it focuses on changing existing processes to increase the possibility of positive outcomes and decrease the chances of undesirable ones.

Taking its energy from a smart CDP, The Optimizer puts a focus on predictive analytics, creating consumer personas quickly and easily by organizing a vast hodgepodge of datapoints.

Those types of capabilities will allow marketers to build campaigns around a single user ID, eliminating duplicate consumer profiles. Optimization takes in and makes sense of multi-touch attribution data from a customer’s journey as it happens and matches audiences with the products, messaging and content that are right for them. The result is the power to orchestrate personalized customer journeys that respond to customer behaviors in real time across the entire customer lifecycle.

At the Top of Its Game

Direct-to-consumer meals provider, Trifecta, needed an analytics overhaul. Its customer insights were inconsistent across its systems, it was missing key touchpoints in its customers’ conversion paths and it had a blurry view of who its customers really were. A classic Data Delayer dilemma.

Trifecta played The Optimizer card by using a sophisticated CDP that allowed flexibility in the way it analyzed and organized consumer data and was transparent in showing what factors were important in determining the effectiveness of different touchpoints. In other words, the company’s marketing team suddenly had loads of options on how it could categorize, call up and allocate importance to various data points.

In the process, Trifecta used its new data-parsing powers to eliminate 50,000 duplicate profiles that had muddied the waters of its intelligence. It was also able to analyze more than 500 blog posts using smart attribution algorithms to map customers’ paths to purchase.

Imagine your data-centric marketing campaigns are up and running and results show promise. Everyone, especially C-suite, is thinking about expansion. But once you attempt to scale, progress slows down—as if your organization was dragging its feet through a bog of powerful restrictions.

That’s The Slow Expander at work—holding you back as you try to sprint.

Some of the ways The Slow Expander can affect your business is through lack of effective standards and policies to use data. You need effective data governance to ensure the data is accurate and secure—both are priorities to keep top of mind when expanding into new markets. New markets also provide complications in privacy compliance management, as different geographical regions (like Europe) have different regulations in that arena.

It can also be difficult to deliver personalized experiences to your customers at scale if you don’t have a clear picture of who your customers are—you can’t activate with precision when the data is not detailed enough. That can get in the way of determining who your potential customers are, which is a serious roadblock to expansion, as well.

So, how do you bring The Slow Expander to its knees?

Clearing the path for expansion, The Clean Collaborator operates from a platform that does more than simply store and parse data. It takes your first-party data and enriches it with third-party insights. The Clean Collaborator lets you share data with your partners and makes data accessible to your whole organization, so all customer experience-related functions work from a single source of truth. It does this via a clean room that ensures everything is privacy compliant and anonymized.

The Clean Collaborator’s power lets you get a clearer view of your customers. Your data can tell you what they do when they interact with your brand. All this collaborative data gives you fuller, richer insights that can be used to broaden your marketing efforts and open up your acquisition efforts.

The Clean Collaborator is one of the good guys, with powers that ensure that your real-time programs adhere to your organization’s specific data governance (its standards and policies for using data), as well as privacy compliance demands.

At the Top of Its Game

Marketers at India-based automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki saw that they were losing potential customers at key points in the sales process, often in the handoff from websites to the nearest local car dealership. To fix it, Maruti Suzuki needed an end-to-end view of the customer’s journey, and that required breaking down siloed data, analyzing the data to get a clearer picture of its customers and using those insights to reach out to new ones.

Using a smart CDP, Maruti was able to take in 2.3 billion rows of data from 11 data sources, resulting in 87 million unified customer data profiles and about 21 million known profiles.

With this new cache of customer insights in hand, the company launched a lookalike marketing campaign to serve potential customers its ad content, which led to up to 200% higher clickthrough rates on ads.

We’re entering the era of privacy-aware hyper-personalization, and that requires you to be 100% efficient in how you organize, enrich and activate your customer data. You need a pocketful of hero cards to beat the data monsters that relentlessly attack your organization’s ability to be agile, secure and grow fast. 

What’s the gameplan? Democratize data by breaking down siloes and enhancing data access. Use insights to get a clearer picture of who your brand’s customers really are and the journey they take to buy a product like yours. Develop personalized experiences that delight them. And, of course, use what you know to find more customers just like them.

The monsters of data can only slow you down if you let them. Pull out your power-ups, empower your heroes and use your CDP to banish the monsters for good.

Treasure Data is a best-of-breed enterprise customer data platform (CDP) that powers the entire business to shape customer-centricity in the age of the digital customer. It does so by connecting all data into one smart customer data platform, uniting teams and systems to power purposeful engagements that drive value and protect privacy for every customer, every time. Trusted by leading companies around the world, Treasure Data customers span the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises. To learn more, visit www.treasuredata.com.

Illustrated by Betsy Falco