This is the first post in a series about how marketers are leveraging Designer Cloud Data Engineering Cloud. In this post, we discuss how Designer Cloud is being used for marketing data onboarding.
In recent years, nothing has endured quite like data-driven marketing—using data effectively has become the status quo for modern marketers, and that expectation is only expanding to include more sophisticated analysis. Meanwhile, the data itself has gotten bigger and more complex. And marketers must be able work with it faster than ever to keep pace with the speed of marketing activity and deliverables to sales organizations. Ensuring that you have the right resources to tackle data will continue to inform the structure of your teams.
Data Onboarding: The Hidden Burden Amongst Marketers
The end purpose for marketing data varies. Typically you see it as a means to determine campaign performance, refactor budgeting, or otherwise measuring performance, but often, it isn’t about discovering an insight at all. Sometimes the hardest part about working with marketing data is simply uploading it into required systems, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation platform. Or, for those in the business of selling marketing services, their own proprietary analytics platform. We refer to this as “data onboarding,” or “the process of transferring offline data to an online environment for marketing needs” and it spans demand generation, customer interaction, and other externally-sourced data. It’s a vital process toward becoming a data-driven marketing team. If you don’t have the right data in the right place, there’s no sense in investing the resources toward measuring or analyzing it.
What makes onboarding marketing data so time-consuming is that it involves data from a variety of external sources. The data isn’t standardized or it’s missing data fields or has incorrect data entries altogether. It’s up to marketers to comb through this data and stitch it into something useful for our CRMs or marketing analytic platforms. Excel is a common tool of choice—it’s helpful and gets the job done, but, like any manual process, it takes time and is error-prone, too. We’ve seen many marketers lose their day to Excel spreadsheets.
Designer Cloud offers a new way to prepare data beyond Excel. That accelerates the process of cleansing data to onboard it into the right systems for marketers, and for users across all fields and industries. Seeing our customers use Designer Cloud to onboard marketing data is particularly exciting, like at Malwarebytes, a company located just south of San Francisco focused on detecting malware.
Marketing Data Onboarding at Malwarebytes
At Malwarebytes, the marketing team is using Designer Cloud to onboard data into their marketing automation platform, Marketo. Like most companies, Malwarebytes’ marketing team collects leads from a variety of different sources—webinars, events, online form fills, conferences, sales representatives, etc.—all of which arrive in different file formats with varying information that is incomplete or incorrect. Malwarebytes must standardize and enrich these datasets with the correct information before they ingest it into Marketo. Before Designer Cloud, the team relied on Excel, but they also needed a lot of additional help from their data science team that cost untold hours in delays. It wasn’t until they adopted Designer Cloud that the team was able to accelerate their process, onboarding 40,000 leads into Marketo—the equivalent of six months work—in just three months. Additionally, the team was able to reduce the number of resources preparing data from five people down to one—Designer Cloud’s automation allowed them to focus their efforts on more complex marketing challenges.
Designer Cloud for Marketing Data Onboarding
The rate at which we’re seeing companies adopt Designer Cloud for onboarding data, and often specifically marketing data, is huge. Whether Designer Cloud is used as a standalone tool for marketing teams, as is the case with Malwarebytes, or is embedded into a proprietary marketing platform, Designer Cloud is solving a critical pain point for marketers.
The primary advantage we hear from marketers for using Designer Cloud is the ability to cleanse and prepare data with an intuitive interface—no more piecing together Excel spreadsheets or recruiting data science teams for help. But the automation that Designer Cloud provides is key, too. With the ability to schedule repeated transformations for each new dataset, marketers are often left to review transformed data, instead of preparing it from scratch. To get a sense for the other features that make Designer Cloud a great fit for onboarding marketing data, we welcome you to try out our free 30-day trial of Designer Cloud.