Data Integration and Automation for Mid-Market Marketing Teams

Don’t let manual operations stymie your business’s growth in 2023. The continued presence of data silos, incomplete data sets, and insufficient technology plagues businesses of all sizes— even enterprise-level behemoths. According to research gathered by WebinarCare, “67% of enterprises are relying on data integration to support analytics and BI platforms today, and 24% are planning to in the next 12 months.”

Even large companies are struggling to adapt to new data-focused BI systems. As such, any mid-market company that takes the plunge is in a position to advance its revenue growth and business efficiency rapidly. Start prioritizing more data-forward systems and RevTech to lead your market and stay ahead of the pack. In this article, we’ll explore:

• The importance of data integration and automation, especially for mid-market organizations
• How marketing teams can start the process
• Some of the tools you may find in your tech stack that benefit the most from data integration

Why Is Data Integration and Automation Important?

Today’s marketing efforts are increasingly focused on multi-channel approaches: your team is advertising across different online platforms and offline media. You’re also creating increasingly personalized campaigns that adapt to consumers’ needs and interests at different stages of the consideration and buying process. But because everything is becoming more granular, it’s important that all of these different channels speak to each other.

For example, you might get a potential new customer’s attention through a radio ad, and they head to Google to search for your brand. If they visit and then leave your site, they will see a couple of your retargeting PPC ads and decide to purchase because they walk past your store. That’s a great outcome, but how can you track and replicate these different touchpoints?

For marketing teams, data integration efforts consolidate the data insights from different channels and platforms into a single source of truth. Once all the different marketing pieces fit together in one dashboard, your team can start parsing through the data to identify the best strategies, gain more insights about buyers, and measure performance over time. 

Because there are so many different channels to reach customers, managing this process manually is virtually impossible. Transferring data from one platform to another takes up a lot of time and opens your analytics up to many potential errors. That’s where automation comes in: with an automatable integration focused on orchestrating data, compiling trends, and delivering those insights to your system of truth, you can see results in real-time. This cuts out work hours, breaks down data silos, and eliminates delays that can cost your business even more. Think about it this way. Customizable, no code integrations create revops machines across the revenue tech stack.

Why is this so critical for mid-market marketing teams? Mid-market companies — or companies ranging from $10 million to $1 billion in revenue each year — can’t afford systemic inefficiencies. These organizations often have small internal marketing teams and don’t have the in-house data solutions that enterprise organizations can create for themselves. Instead, the marketing team needs to look for secure automation tools that can speak to all third-party platforms in a RevOps tech stack without jeopardizing security, efficiency, or versatility.

Related: How to Determine the Next Best Action to Inform Your Marketing Plan

Where Do I Start?: Quick Overview for Mid-Market Marketing Teams

Jumping from disparate tools and processes to a smoothly running, automated data system is a hard leap, no matter where your organization is starting from. Marketers in mid-market organizations can make excellent headway by taking these four steps: 

1. Identify Your Tech Stack

Do you know all of the programs that your marketers use from task to task? A lot of businesses don’t. While some of this opacity may be due to uncontrolled processes, a lot is due to the sheer size of the tech stack. Research from Statista puts the average marketing tech stack at approximately ten tools, with 44% of businesses having between five and ten and 30% between 11 and 20 tools. Survey your teams to understand what they use and how they fit together.

2. Start Creating Clean Data Initiatives and Audits

Those tools generate a lot of data as your employees use them and prospective customers interact with your marketing efforts. You may have clear insight into who is visiting your website from PPC ads through one platform, and another marketer may have insight into your email marketing efforts. However, that data may not be clean, especially if you have semi-centralized sources of information. Check your individual data sets for errors, duplicates, and gaps, so the data is in good shape for analytics later.

3. Ensure the Third-Party Tools in Your Tech Stack Can Talk to Each Other

Just because one employee can see the PPC ad data and another can see email marketing data doesn’t mean your team has real insight into those channels. Look for third-party integrations to pull together the data from those initiatives to see what traffic is engaged by both channels, what markets you aren’t reaching, and more. After all, the vast majority of customer journeys involve several touchpoints (HubSpot puts the number at eight touchpoints), and you need to see the whole picture to know if that’s happening.

4. Make Data Integration Part of Every Job Role

Data integration, especially during the initial stages, seems like a lot of unasked-for work from your team’s perspective. They’re already busy marketing campaigns, creating new assets, and assessing incoming leads. You won’t see progress if your team doesn’t buy into data integration initiatives (especially when cleaning the data and using your tech stack). So make sure your team has plenty of time for data integration projects, the right incentives to prioritize tasks, and clear benefits for all their hard work. This can’t just be extra work on top of their day-to-day tasks.

Good Automation Systems Can Improve These Top RevTech Platforms

The right revenue tech stack is essential for any business, and you may already have your favorites in place. But you don’t have to switch to different CRMs, advertising platforms, or email engines to start integrating your marketing data. See how you can benefit from integrations to these popular platforms:

• Marketo: Make Marketo talk to tools outside the Adobe ecosystem, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Dynamics, and Zoho so you can have the full picture of a lead’s behavior and activities. And don’t forget the systems within the Adobe ecosystem that don’t natively connect like Adobe Commerce, formerly known as Magento. 
• SalesLoft: SalesLoft gives teams an in-depth look at the status of deals, sales activities, and conversations. Tie this information to your CRM for more cohesive stages and stops throughout the pipeline.
• HubSpot: Effortlessly send prospect details from contact forms out of HubSpot and into all of your marketing tools. HubSpot data is invaluable, but only if it can reach all other spokes in your omnichannel marketing approach.
• Salesforce: Companies that use Salesforce house almost all of their customer data within the platform. Integrating it with your marketing tools allows you to seamlessly consolidate contact accounts to increase personalization, prevent duplication, revise profiles with up-to-date information, and clean up workflows. There are a lot of native Salesforce integrations out there but most don’t cut it for the mid market business, so look for no-code, nearly native solutions to get the job done right. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365: See the impact of your marketing efforts on your client accounts by integrating Dynamics 365 and the rest of your stack. This can automatically move prospects to leads to customers based on the results of your campaigns without any manual toggles or clicks.
• Bullhorn: Make all parts of your marketing projects speak to each other by making applicant, staffing, and recruiting efforts more transparent. In today’s job market, active outreach to potential hires is just as important as cohesive messaging for potential customers.

Related: Power Your Org With eCommerce and Omnichannel

Build Out Your Tech Stack With the Right Automation Integration Solution

Integrating all the tools in your tech stack immediately eliminates many manual, error-prone processes legacy companies hold onto for too long. By switching to more automation, you can let your team focus on analytics, creative content tasks, and building rapport with leads instead of filling their day with data entry, long internal audit processes, and lots of back-end administrative work.

At Vertify, we specialize in helping all of the elements in your tech stack work together. Our automation solution creates seamless data-sharing between Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and more. Schedule a demo today to see how much data integration can supercharge your RevTech.