While the goal of marketing has remained the same throughout the generations, the how of marketing has shifted drastically. There is so much data out there today that it’s irresponsible not to invest in it – especially when it comes to marketing and advertising.
The larger the business you are, however, the more challenging it becomes to actually manage and use the data that you have. This has been the crux of enterprise-sized businesses for years. You have the information somewhere. That information can help you master customer segmentation, offer high levels of personalization, and completely change the game when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.
However, if you don’t have easy access to your data, it’s impossible to get your goals off their feet. That’s where enterprise integration comes into play. While enterprise integration doesn’t have a direct correlation to marketing, there are so many benefits you can gain that will change how you market forever.
What is Enterprise Integration?
So, what is enterprise integration? The topic itself is well worth diving into, since it lets you finally connect all of your applications, data sources, and processes together. Enterprise integration aims to get all of your systems talking together. You want data flowing.
Can you do more with your data than just get it all linked up? Yes, of course. You can go and create a data fabric, for example, and keep all your data in a single data warehouse. That, however, is for later. If you haven’t made progress with enterprise integration, then that is the first step.
Once you get your enterprise integration platform up and running, you’ll be able to optimize all business processes, gain a deeper insight into every single one of your customers (essential for marketing), and establish a platform that can be further customized with APIs.
How Enterprise Integration Will Change Your Marketing Approach
You might already have an inkling of how enterprise integration can help you get a handle on your processes to benefit your marketing efforts, but the true benefits are widespread:
Improvements in the Customer Experience
Linking all of your enterprise’s systems and datasets together means all available information for every single customer can now be linked. Go further and actually collect all bits of data into a single customer file (with a unique ID, to account for those with the same name), and you can enhance the customer experience with:
Personalization should be seen as making content and advertising materials as relevant as possible to a customer. If they give you information (like birthdays, preferences, or buying history) then you can use that information to make your marketing truly personal. However, if they don’t give you that information, stick to relevance. Since user data, analytics, customer queries, and even sales are now linked up, you can easily offer that relevant personalization at all levels of the customer journey.
Omnichannel marketing is a seamless marketing journey that covers all channels. This means social media, email, in-store, and online interactions feel connected and cohesive. You can do a lot automatically today, but to do it successfully, you need an integrated system.
Decision-Making Changes
If you know what your customers want, what the market’s moving towards, and what your competition is doing you can make some truly insightful, clever decisions for the benefit of your business, and marketing. You can’t, however, do so quickly unless all your systems are integrated and you have access to all of your data at once. With an integrated enterprise, you can:
If all of your data is accessible at once you can use AI and analytical systems to provide you with real-time insights that can help you stay agile in your marketing decisions. These insights can even be automatically implemented. For example, you can set the hero product on your main page to automatically reflect the product with the highest volume of site traffic.
- Adopt a Data-Driven Marketing Approach
Data-driven campaigns help you tell the right story, in the right way, at the right time. Data can help you craft a message that speaks to your customers, and, more importantly, it can help you know the when, where, and how. Integrate your systems, and you can easily collect all the information needed to make those marketing-critical decisions.
Boost Operational Efficiency
One of the key benefits of enterprise integration, using any method, is that it works to speed up and streamline operational workflows – including those in your marketing and sales departments.
Automation cannot occur if a process is stop-gapped. A software can take care of all the automated tasks within its purview, but once that task needs to be shipped on to the next tool it could halt the process right then and there unless they’re all integrated. With enterprise integration, you can set up easy automated workflows in your marketing.
Master Marketing Measuring
Integrating your entire enterprise system together also does wonders for data collection. You can put together a comprehensive analytics system across channels that lets you unify your entire marketing performance, not just segments of it at a time.
Key Considerations and Challenges to Successfully Use Enterprise Integration to Enhance Your Marketing Strategies
While enterprise integration naturally offers many big benefits for your marketing efforts, there are some challenges you need to be aware of in advance, so you can overcome them quickly.
- Data Quality: If your data is incomplete, inaccurate, or isn’t sorted properly then the output will also be skewered. You’ll also need a robust data fabric strategy in order to properly organize datasets to maximise effectiveness:
- Security and Privacy: Unifying your system can come with security risks. You’ll need to lock data behind user access controls and make sure everyone in your business is fully trained on data privacy and security.
- Integration Challenges: Linking an entire enterprise together takes time. Start with essential systems and work outwards. Expect this process to take time, so go in with a multi-step plan of action.
Even with these challenges ahead, the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience, so get started with integrating your enterprise, and use those benefits to boost your marketing efforts today.
