Why your growth needs a single source of truth

There’s a lot of activity that goes into a great marketing strategy.

Paid media, social media, organic search, content marketing, PR, email marketing and more traditional “off line” tactics like newsletters and brochures.

It’s all required to get to your customers.

But it does create a big challenge.

And that’s when it comes to reporting and making sense of marketing and sales data.

With so many marketing channels engaging customers and trying to get them to act in different ways, from engagement to making a purchase, how can you keep up with everything and use your data to not only measure success of your campaigns - but to improve them?

The only answer is to create a ‘single source of truth’ for monitoring and measuring your growth. You need to create a single source of truth across your business strategy.

This is a single repository of all your marketing and sales data that can be segmented, mixed and forensically analysed in one place.

Without it, you can easily overlook an important part of your marketing analytics and start making decisions based on inaccurate or at least incomplete data.

There’s plenty of analytics platforms out there that can pull your marketing and sales stats into one place.

But it’s not just about pulling your marketing stats from all your channels.

It’s using those stats and understanding how they’re impacting the most important platform you have - your CRM.

Your CRM needs to be central to that single source of truth.

So you need to find something that not only measures your marketing stats, but does so attached to your CRM as well.

Before we get into the best platform for creating your single source of truth, lets look at why it’s so important just a bit more.

Why your growth needs a single source of truth

Creating a single source of truth creates a unified platform where everyone in your company can access data from a single point.

By pulling data from multiple streams and placing them in one place, it makes it easier to see the bigger picture and is a critical part of developing marketing insights.

Using all the marketing and sales data available to the company, marketers can access and understand insights into every part of their activity whether it’s social media campaigns, paid media, account-based marketing or organic search and content.

And it can all be measured in real-time.

But connecting all this data is key.

It’s fine looking at analytics and understanding blog views, or social shares.

But how is that impacting click-through rates, what content is actually driving revenue and what is happening to conversion rates and customer gain from each channel?

Trying to monitor and measure all this in siloed data from each platform is going to be impossible.

Especially considering that few customers will only engage with one of our marketing channels before making a buying decision.

Many will engage with multiple pieces of content, across multiple channels.

And it’s understanding this and tying this data into the ultimate sales information that’s important.

And it’s why we need that single source of truth.

With it, marketers have a complete picture of exactly how each of our channels and campaigns is performing down to the smallest detail.

Understanding this data to such an extent means we can make the minor changes to messaging and targeting that can make the difference between growth - and not.

Creating that single source of truth with HubSpot

As you’ll know by now, we’re a HubSpot advocate (we should be, as one of just a few Elite partners of theirs) and we unapologetically promote the fact that HubSpot is the best marketing, sales and RevOps platform on the market.

But as with most things, HubSpot does enough to prove us right.

And that’s definitely the case when it comes to creating a single source of truth for your marketing and sales data.

For one, it literally pulls ALL your data into one place.

That’s your CRM, website CMS, social media channels, ABM data, email campaigns - everything.

All these platforms can store their own data, but HubSpot integrates with them all and pulls the data through to its own reporting.

With HubSpot, you can easily review your marketing channels in isolation if you want to.

If you’ve recently launched a series of blogs you can review your traffic to those blogs and see how customers are interacting with them.

And that’s fine.

But that will only get you so far.

What about when it comes to customer journey mapping and improving your sales journey?

With HubSpot, you can start in your CRM to identify customers and prospects, and follow their journey all the way back to their first touchpoint with you.

Over time and with a big enough sample, you can start to see trends in the way your customers first engage with you, where you lose leads, and how your customers move from start to finish.

This means you can create more content that drives customers through your company.

But without your single source of truth, you wouldn’t be able to do this.

The best you could do is measure how each channel is working in isolation.

Creating personalised, contextualised customer experiences across the company

It’s not just marketing and sales that benefit from a single source of truth.

Your customer service teams can also use customer data to improve satisfaction and the services that will keep your customers happy.

And this is the key benefit to creating a single source of truth.

Ultimately it comes down to making sure the right person can put the right content in front of the right customer at the right time - regardless of which department they work in.

It can empower everyone in your company in a customer-facing role to be confident in reaching out to customers.

Because they understand that customer because of the data they’ve had access to, they’ll be able to create personalised responses that otherwise would have been more generic in the ‘spray and pray’ model of days gone by.

Ready to improve your marketing, sales and service data?

Get in touch if you’re ready to start making better use of your customer data with HubSpot.

As an elite partner we know the platform like the back of our hand and can help you integrate all your marketing data into one place to help you create your single source of truth that will take your marketing, sales and service to the next level.