How teams collect, manage, and use data is one of the hottest topics in marketing right now — because data management is the foundation for basically everything that matters in 2024. It’s crucial for protecting consumer privacy and enabling strategic decision-making. It influences your team’s ability to leverage the latest and greatest AI applications. And good customer data makes it possible to provide personalized experiences at scale.
So let’s unpack the framework that has long been considered the holy grail of marketing data: having a single source of truth (SSOT) for your marketing data.
Everyone says you need one. And you can spend an awful lot of money trying to buy one. But what exactly is a single source of truth for marketing — and why does it matter so much?
What is a single source of truth for marketing?
Ironically, there’s no single piece of technology or standalone tool that is a single source of truth. You can look at the martech stacks of a dozen different organizations and find a dozen different ways of approaching a single source of truth for marketing. But the fundamental concept is this: everyone should use the same information for decision-making, strategic planning, and executing campaigns. No data silos, no duplicative sources, no conflicting definitions.
Practically speaking, a SSOT is a central hub that consolidates customer data from multiple sources and surfaces insights to team members — such as website visits, email engagement, purchase history, chat transcripts, and support tickets.
Building a SSOT for marketing typically involves aggregating data from multiple sources in a cloud-based data warehouse or data lake, and then layering a user interface on top. While a decent amount of this data can be found in tools like your CRM, a SSOT will encompass data from marketing automation, customer support, finance, product usage, and other systems to represent a holistic view of the customer journey.
Some organizations use expensive customer data platforms (CDPs). Some rely on standalone BI tools, like Looker or Tableau. And some organizations rally around analytics within a shared platform, like the Act-On Analytics embedded in our marketing automation solution. (We’re biased, but we like this approach because it delivers insights in the tool your team is already using every day.)
The right approach to a single source of truth depends on your company size, your use case, your level of data literacy, and (let’s be real) your budget. But regardless of what a SSOT looks like at a given org, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a marketing leader who doesn’t find it incredibly valuable. Here’s why.
Why an SSOT matters so much
The big-picture reason for having a SSOT is simple: you don’t want your team coming up with different answers to the same questions. That causes upstream confusion that makes it difficult to measure success for any initiative.
As consultant Greig DeSautel writes for Thoughtspot, “Data results in businesses cannot be like Google search where users must determine which answer they want from several choices (which causes concern over whether a single version of the truth exists). In business, there can only be one answer. If it isn’t the same answer for every user, data chaos and a lack of trust in data will continue to grow within an organization.”
The benefits of a single source of truth
Beyond avoiding existential data chaos, there are some tangible benefits to maintaining a single source of truth for your marketing data.
Faster, more accurate analysis
Working with an SSOT enables real-time access to the data you need, when you need it. This helps streamline campaign performance analysis and enable quicker adjustments.
Higher productivity
Wrangling and reconciling data across different systems takes up a lot of resources and mental energy. With an SSOT, your team can get the insights they need and focus more of their time and attention on strategic thinking and creative work.
More alignment across teams
When marketing shares a single source of truth with other teams (especially sales), everyone speaks the same language and shares the same understanding of what metrics mean. This helps build alignment and remove roadblocks — like that long email thread debating whose definition of “conversion rate” is correct.
Formalized data security
Most SSOT solutions come with industry-standard security certifications and data protection features like user permissions and access controls. These help protect your consumers’ data and stay in compliance with ever-changing global regulations.
Improved spend optimization
Using a SSOT, it’s much easier for marketers to compare performance across multiple factors like channels, audience segments, or content types. By zeroing in on the most and least effective spending areas, you can tweak budgets or reallocate resources to improve performance.
The drawbacks of siloed data
Clearly, these benefits aren’t just nice-to-haves. Leaving your data scattered across multiple systems opens up your marketing team to some risks — including compromising data integrity and wasting an awful lot of time and energy.
More human error
Manual data management — like copy-pasting columns between spreadsheets or downloading a CSV from one platform and uploading it to another — inevitably leads to human error. Data can easily be duplicated, misentered, or missed entirely.
Debating whose data is accurate
In a world without an SSOT, data disputes are common. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams — or even different groups within the marketing org — all bring a different definition or understanding of data to the table. Sometimes, it feels like you spend more time debating whose data to use than actually using it.
Waiting on overloaded analysts to answer ad-hoc requests
Without an easily accessible SSOT, teams often rely on analysts who are overloaded with ad-hoc requests to deliver insights — becoming bottlenecks and slowing down important decision-making. (And that’s assuming you even have the budget for an analyst in the first place.)
Failing to comply with digital marketing regulations
In the absence of a consolidated data hub, your email team may rely on manual data wrangling for time-sensitive tasks like updating user preferences — which can lead to non-compliance with digital marketing privacy rules and even costly fines.
Losing out on the power of AI
As AI capabilities increase, marketers will need centralized and reliable data to realize its full potential.
As our own VP of Marketing Jeff Day puts it, “What audiences do you want to personalize for? How are they different? What data are you going to need to accurately drive AI to understand your customer and the business context? If you’re not collecting that information, then AI can’t do its job.”
Poor decision-making
Ultimately, the biggest cost of siloed data is poor decision-making. Without consistent, accurate, timely information, every marketer will struggle to deliver their best work — from setting strategic plans to creating content to optimizing campaign performance.
What you can achieve with a SSOT
Let’s take a look into your theoretical future and imagine a few examples of what marketing could look like with a reliable, accessible single source of marketing truth.
Enhanced personalization
A financial services marketing org’s SSOT provides a detailed view of each corporate client’s interactions, from transactions to content downloads to service inquiries. This comprehensive data allows the team to detect and quantify growing interest in investment products, and share tailored content like webinars or whitepapers through their marketing automation platform — setting the stage for a future upsell.
Cross-channel marketing optimization
With clear insights into which marketing channels perform best, a manufacturing firm’s paid ads team identifies that LinkedIn outperforms PPC — and promoting webinars generates the most qualified leads over all other content types. By increasing spend on LinkedIn webinar ads, the team sees higher ROI for their campaigns.
Identifying top-performing cohorts
Armed with aggregated analytics, a SaaS organization can conduct a cohort analysis — understanding which industries, geographic locations, and company sizes aren’t just showing interest but actively engaging and subscribing to the platform. Together, marketing and sales can use this information to refine their ideal customer profile (ICP), update lead scoring criteria, and develop targeted outreach campaigns.
Discover the difference with a SSOT
Marketing data is inherently messy, but with a single source of truth, there’s a brighter future ahead: robust integrations, consolidated reporting, and actionable insights.
Learn more in our webinar on how aggregating your data in your marketing automation platform can help you outperform the competition.