Product marketers require various types of data to comprehend the market, customer needs, and the effectiveness of their solution. Each of these categories has multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) within them.

For instance, metrics such as feature adoption rate, user journey paths, and churn rates indicate how good the product is.

All of these numbers are tracked by different tools that various team members manage within the product marketing team. For example, a content writer can use Google Analytics to track website traffic and how long visitors stay on the site. A salesperson can use Salesforce to monitor how long it takes for leads to convert.

As you can imagine, running various product marketing processes where multiple team members are getting real-time data from different directions can lead to data silos.

Let’s say that a product marketer is deciding between a few SaaS pricing models for a new niche they are entering. They need to look at various data points such as customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, etc., to make the right decision.

However, if the marketing team has data silos within, it can get challenging for them to get all the relevant data efficiently, which could lead to delays and errors.

So, how can product marketers help their teams overcome this?

In this article, let’s look at five tips that can help product marketers break data silos to optimize their promotional strategies and drive sales.

1. Align KPIs with business objectives

The first step to breaking data silos within the marketing department is to ensure you are tracking the right metrics, nothing more or less. This approach, apart from significantly decreasing the chances of data overload ensures that all the marketing efforts are focused on driving desirable and tangible results.

As a result, teams can make the right data-driven decisions to improve their campaign efficiency and communicate effectively with the stakeholders during leadership and strategy meetings.

To get started, you can begin by listing your present business goals such as getting new customers, raising awareness, etc., and identifying the relevant metrics for each of them. For instance, KPIs like website traffic and social media engagement can help measure brand awareness.

It can be a good idea to focus on the right amount of business objectives at a given time based on your current requirements and resources. For instance, you can focus on getting new customers after you have generated demand for your product.

After finalizing the relevant metrics collaboratively with the team, you can determine tools that will monitor them. However, as we mentioned above, too many analytics tools can get problematic, which brings us to the next tip.

2. Adopt an integrated analytics tools

Product marketing teams usually use multiple tools to run and manage various promotional campaigns. As a result, they have to cycle through various dashboards to gain comprehensive insights and find areas of improvement.

This can lead to fragmented analysis where data-backed insights are distributed across various tools leading to a resource-intensive marketing analytics workflow. Not to mention, this could delay decisions and eventually actions, resulting in missed opportunities.

Integrated analytics tools can solve this challenge by serving as a single source of truth that pulls data from multiple dashboards. Teams can look forward to efficient data analysis, streamlined marketing reporting processes, and faster decision-making.

Tools like Domo, Segment, and Zapier can help you build an integrated performance dashboard where you can track all the KPIs that are relevant to your current business objectives.

3. Establish a data governance framework

Information about customer behavior is one of the most important data for product marketing teams. At the same time, the data is quite personal which requires you to handle that information responsibly due to ethical reasons and regulatory compliance.

A data governance framework is a set of guidelines, principles, and practices that help product marketers manage the collected information securely and profitably. This helps product marketing teams to:

  • Enhance data quality and consistency to improve the accuracy of the insights drawn and changes driven by them.
  • Stay compliant with local and international laws and regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA to avoid legal penalties and reputational damage.
  • Make better decisions about product positioning, pricing, and promotional strategies as they will have access to reliable data.
  • Efficiently manage data to reduce redundancy and ensure that marketing efforts are based on the most relevant and up-to-date information while decreasing operational costs.

You can start building such a framework by defining what you aim to achieve with your data governance initiative and the scope of data it will cover. After assigning clear roles and responsibilities to distribute action items efficiently, you can create standard operating procedures for them.

It is crucial to adopt the tools that your marketing team can handle customer and other sensitive data efficiently and securely to enable swift and accurate decision-making.

4. Train and educate your team

Training and educating your team about data literacy enhances their ability to understand, analyze, and use data to make informed decisions, which is essential for developing effective marketing strategies and achieving business objectives.

They can identify and interpret relevant data, improving their ability to communicate insights and drive data-driven initiatives within the organization.

Then, navigating and complying with increasingly complex data privacy regulations to safeguard both the company and customer information.

To help your team do so, you can get started with these well-received resources:

5. Build a transparent and open work culture

An open work culture in a product marketing team encourages the free flow of information, enhances collaboration, and leads to more cohesive and effective strategies.

The workflows managed by a product marketer will get faster as duplication of efforts and waiting for marketing data will be a thing of the past resulting in results-driven change.

Here are some best practices marketing teams can get started with:

  1. Cultivating an organizational culture that values openness and actively discourages the creation of silos from the leadership level is crucial.
  2. It is essential to adopt technologies such as cloud storage, project management software, and internal communication tools that are accessible to all relevant team members.
  3. Schedule regular meetings or check-ins for the product marketing team to discuss ongoing projects, share updates, and collaborate on challenges.
  4. Encourage and value the feedback received on how to improve processes, break down barriers, and enhance collaboration.
  5. Involve team members in decision-making processes where feasible to improve the quality of decisions through diverse inputs and increase their accountability to the outcomes.

Wrapping up

Product marketers and their teams need to eliminate data silos to facilitate accurate planning and efficient execution of marketing strategies to achieve the current business objectives.

They can do that by defining business objectives and mapping KPIs to them, adopting integrated analytics tools that can serve as the single source of truth, building a dynamic and robust data governance framework that can simplify the management of sensitive information, empower everyone with the right know-how and tools, and fostering a work culture that values openness and transparency.