So it’s time to stop keeping your data in silos. The key to your next brand-rocking campaign could lie within your powerful Competitive Intelligence. However, unless you know how to turn it into inspiring marketing messages and then get these messages out there to the right audience in the real world you’ve still only explored the tip of the iceberg.
You could be doing more with your data. Turn insight into action and outcomes. Avoid just having data in silos and put your marketing hats on and experience the benefits of combining intelligence and marketing with:
- Improved customer relationships and customer retention
- Wider or more profitable customer attraction
- Also, damage limitation and brand clarity – and more.
Don’t let your Competitive Intelligence end with the report. Use it to improve marketing by driving insight-led campaigns to show the rest of the world how amazing you really are, compared to your competitors. The facts are at your fingertips. Use them. It’s not about data in silos.
Why Are Data Silos Bad? – From Hubspot
Whatever the cause may be for your organisation, it’s clear that data silos aren’t good, but what is truly so wrong with them?
1. They give an incomplete view of the business
C-level executives have the task to consolidate all the company’s data. If you are that executive making the calls, you know your sales teams will talk about new clients, marketing will share the number of leads and traffic, and the accounting team can give you a report of expenses and profit. But what links all that information together? Trying to manage a business with isolated data is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. Data silos stop you from having a 360-degree view of your business.
2. They create a less collaborative environment
Each team ends up working independently in the presence of data silos. They only have access to their own data, so that is the only data they work with. This creates a divided organization. Teams do not collaborate with each other on projects, which makes it near impossible for the company to share a common vision. We’ve said that managers want to make decisions based on data. But if the leaders of each team can’t see the big picture and only have access to their own fragment of the data, their individual decisions will rarely be aligned towards global business goals. In environments where data silos are the norm, a culture of transparency and trust is very difficult to maintain. Instead, you might be creating rivalry and competition between teams focusing on their own micro-goals.
3. They lead to bad customer experience
In most businesses, there are multiple customer touch points. These interactions happen through a variety of channels and during different stages of the buyer’s journey. That means that you’ll have members of several teams like support, billing, sales, or marketing interacting with the same customer or buyer. When data is isolated, you can easily lose track of your customer’s story with your company — and nothing is more frustrating for a customer than having to repeat their story over and over again to different people.
4. They slow the pace of your organisation
It’s a waste of time to have data silos. Rather than being able to automatically streamline data across teams, data is isolated within teams. This means teams have to wait until they realize they need data they don’t have, find where the data lies within the organization, manually gain access to it, and then analyze it for their own purposes. By the time you collect the data, it may no longer be valid.
5. They waste storage space
If every single employee who needs the same data saves it to their company storage folder, that wastes precious storage space. This, in return, wastes your budget on storing data that you neither need nor want. It would consume a lot less space if the data were streamlined onto one platform that was accessible by all employees within that organisation.
6. They threaten the accuracy of your data
Data is one of the most valuable assets of your business. Having several tools collecting information about your prospects, customers and partners increases your company’s value. But when that data is outdated, incomplete or missing, the value that you could get from it goes down significantly. As mentioned above, the longer the isolated data sits around, the more likely that it becomes outdated and, thus, inaccurate and unusable. In addition, every team may have access to their own set of the same data.
This leads to objectivity in data that skews in favor of the team that owns them. Working with data silos results in poor-quality data because these fragmented pieces of information are difficult to assemble. If your data is not integrated or in sync, you’ll surely see conflicting data when you try to cross-check the information from different sources.
