The trend of data-driven marketing has been gaining traction in recent times. Essentially, data-driven marketing refers to the utilization of massive data accumulated by various marketing tools and platforms for analyzing customer behavior, requirements, and preferences. With these insights, optimizing marketing campaigns and driving lead conversion rates becomes easier for marketing-based businesses. However, for aggregation, storage, and analysis of data, building and deploying a dedicated marketing data warehouse is important.
For marketing businesses with minimal technical expertise support, designing and launching an exclusive data warehouse is a challenging endeavor. In such a scenario, marketing firms should consider hiring skilled data engineers from a reputable consulting services provider for marketing data warehouse development.
Implementing a Robust Marketing Data Warehouse with Data Engineers
Marketing data warehouse creation involves various technical aspects, such as data architecture design, cloud storage deployment, analytics, and visualization enablement. By collaborating with a trustworthy data engineering consulting firm, marketing enterprises can delegate these technical responsibilities to a skilled engineering team and launch the data infrastructure in a minimal turnaround time.
Dedicated data engineers prioritize collaborating with the professionals and stakeholders in marketing teams before stepping into the warehouse development. This enables them to understand the firm’s overall marketing strategy and analytical requirements, ensuring that the designed warehouse supports flexible analytics and reporting. Agility in warehouse analytics enables marketing professionals to observe various customer metrics and campaign key performance indicators and easily optimize promotional/customer engagement campaigns.
Some other benefits of developing and deploying a marketing data warehouse with dedicated data engineers include:
- Cost-Savings – Developing a marketing data warehouse using in-house professionals requires marketing firms to spend huge capital expenditure on acquiring software licenses and subscriptions. On the other hand, hiring dedicated data engineers for marketing data warehouse development can help businesses significantly reduce the upfront capital expenditure, as these professionals are equipped with licensed tools and technologies.
- Robust Data Security & Governance – While designing the architecture of the marketing data warehouse, data engineers incorporate encryption and access control mechanisms. These mechanisms eliminate the unauthorized accessibility of marketing datasets. Similarly, engineers implement a data governance model within the marketing data warehouse. The governance model eliminates the tampering of analytical and reporting outcomes.
- Post-Deployment Maintenance – Even after deploying the marketing data warehouse, data engineers monitor the performance, implement upgrades, and resolve technical issues. This level of support is crucial for ensuring the long-term effectiveness and profitability of data warehouses.
3 Key Steps Involved in Marketing Data Warehouse Implementation
- Warehouse Architecture Design
An architecture acts as the backbone of a marketing data warehouse. Dedicated data engineers design the architecture of warehouses using data modeler tools. Data modeler tools enable data engineers to create and incorporate data connectors and a staging environment within the architecture of marketing data warehouses. The data connectors created by data engineers integrate with a range of marketing platforms and tools, such as CRM systems, ad networks, and social media platforms. This integration enables the connectors to consistently gather data related to marketing campaigns and customer behavior/preferences. Consequently, engineers program the connectors to transfer accumulated marketing data to a staging environment. The staging environment acts as an interim raw data storage solution.
- Cloud Deployment
Data engineers meticulously deploy the designed architecture of a marketing data warehouse in a cloud environment. This deployment approach enables the marketing warehouse’s architecture to seamlessly scale the storage of raw marketing data within the staging environment. Besides, cloud deployment enables data engineers to configure and embed ETL (Extract Transform Load) pipelines with the staging environment of the marketing data warehouse.
ETL pipelines autonomously extract raw marketing data in the staging environment and apply transformation conditions on the data. The transformation process is crucial for cleansing, deduplicating, and standardizing the format of marketing data, thereby ensuring consistency and compatibility before analysis. After transformation, the pipeline loads the standardized data in the marketing data warehouse’s cloud storage environment.
- Analytics and Visualization Enablement
Data engineers set up an integration between the marketing data warehouse’s storage environment and visualization tools. By designing custom APIs, data engineers easily connect data visualizations tools like Power BI or Tableau with the marketing data warehouse. This enables the marketers to visualize campaign or customer engagement data in real-time via dashboards. Besides, visualization dashboards enable marketing leaders to understand the performance of campaigns across multiple channels and make strategic decisions related to campaign scaling and optimization.
Similarly, experts from a reliable data engineering services provider design and integrate custom predictive and prescriptive analytics models with the marketing data warehouse’s storage environment. For instance, data engineers configure the predictive analytics model to process customer campaign engagement and interaction data accumulated within the warehouse and predict the lifetime value of each customer. By analyzing the lifetime value, marketers can primarily focus on high-value customers for remarketing and take appropriate engagement and retention measures to influence other customers. This approach is crucial for improving the overall profitability of campaigns.
Wrapping Up
In essence, investing in the development of a dedicated data infrastructure is crucial for marketing businesses to embrace the data-driven marketing culture. However, to design and launch a robust marketing data warehouse, firms should consider partnering with a renowned data engineering solutions provider. Skilled data engineering professionals build the warehouse in line with the analytical and operational requirements of marketing enterprises. Furthermore, after the deployment of marketing data infrastructure, data engineers use proactive monitoring tools to identify and resolve issues, such as data latency and pipeline errors. This way, data engineers ensure optimal performance of marketing data warehouses.
