Informatica Marketing Data Lake Powers Marketing with Big Data

Despite years of investing in a slew of stovepipe applications, ranging from online advertising bid management, to web technology, to marketing automation, to CRM, most B2B marketing organizations still struggle to answer such key questions as “what’s the value of the various marketing touches, programs and channels?” and “do they drive only opportunities and pipeline or actual revenue?” Unable to connect the dots across all the marketing apps, organizations are forced to fly blind and optimize per marketing function rather than end-to-end.

Informatica, the world’s No.1 provider of data management solutions, is removing marketing’s traditional blinders with an innovative new Marketing Data Lake product that gives marketers self-service access to all data relevant to marketing. Informatica has battle tested the Big Data Marketing approach in its own go-to-market for the last nine months and will make the world’s first commercial Marketing Data Lake, built on the Informatica Intelligent Data Lake, available beginning in June, 2016. Its underlying principles and workings are detailed in a new book: The Marketing Data Lake, or How a New Generation of Marketing Analytics (and a Big Data Mindset) Changes… Absolutely Everything.

“Of all the organizations within a company, the one that has experienced the most profound digital transformation is marketing,” said Franz Aman, senior vice president of marketing, Informatica. “In the past, it has often been difficult for marketers to justify investments, which is why we set out to build a more accountable and agile marketing machine at Informatica using big data and readily available technology. The results have been so transformational that we are productizing our efforts with Informatica Marketing Data Lake. Integration of technology has been the number one pain point in marketing. This is finally over with the Marketing Data Lake providing an integrated, end-to-end view across all the platforms, silos and channels. Everything marketers want to know about their customers’ and prospects’ relationships with their companies can be analyzed, including their engagement with products and marketing programs, and which campaigns deliver meaningful revenue.”

Marketing has long been considered a cost center or discretionary spend. With Informatica Marketing Data Lake, data-driven marketers transform marketing into a revenue generating line of business that is able to use data to maximize the return on their marketing investment. For example, the Informatica team used heat maps to detect spikes in Web traffic and other marketing engagements, such as email click through at the account level; thereby, allowing for targeted follow up by telesales. Because the account specific dashboards include data about the specific product and solution interest, it became very easy to have meaningful conversations with prospects on the phone and increase the success rate. Because Informatica had that data, the team was able to accelerate the deal.

“Having a single platform to house customer and prospect data from disparate sources and a consistent secure enterprise view of data across business units is the foundation of our Customer 360 vision ” said Vishal Bamba, vice president, Innovation and Architecture, Transamerica. “We’ve also been able to reduce the time it takes to integrate and relate customer information into an end-to-end customer journey from weeks to hours. The Marketing Data Lake will enable Transamerica to gain new insights and allow Marketing to deliver targeted and personalized programs to our customers.”

Informatica puts its Marketing Data Lake solution to the test every day. The company is using it to continually mine for promising prospect interactions, and review, analyze and evaluate its marketing activities. Informatica’s Marketing Data Lake has had an immense impact on marketing at Informatica. Areas where the Marketing Data Lake has been transformative for Informatica include:

· Comprehensive data – Informatica is using the Marketing Data Lake to consolidate data across numerous marketing apps including Marketo, Salesforce, Adobe Analytics and others. Additionally Lattice provides predictive lead scores and Demandbase demographics and social data. Further, Tableau delivers a comprehensive real-time view of the integrated data. The solution delivers a consolidated view that enables users to connect the dots all the way to booked revenue. Informatica marketers are now empowered by an account view across disparate applications, an accurate view of product interest and the ability to more consistently personalize customers’ engagements.

· Predictive analytics – The Marketing Data Lake provides Informatica with the ability to process large and disparate sources of data faster and more flexibly than ever before. This makes it possible to innovate quickly and to ask analytics questions that were never considered previously. With the Marketing Data Lake, Informatica marketers no longer need to predict what questions they will want to ask in the future, or what new sources they may one day want to add.

· Marketing agility – The Marketing Data Lake provides Informatica with the agility required to take insights and quickly automate the process of transforming big data into business value. This has increased marketing campaign effectiveness, conversion rates, customer engagement and sales.

· Handling data complexity – Informatica marketers are no longer limited to handling only fully structured data. With the Marketing Data Lake, Informatica is able to store and tap into semi-structured data, such as Salesforce text fields, and unstructured data, such as text from Twitter feeds and other social media data. Moreover, a data lake is considerably less costly to build and maintain, and can be filled with data to an almost fathomless degree.

Informatica, Deloitte and the Informatica Marketing Data Lake
“Deloitte helps companies create lasting customer relationships and increase profits through smart analytics,” said Ed See, Partner Digital Marketing and Customer Analytics, Deloitte Consulting. “Deloitte’s deep industry knowledge and technical know-how, combined with the Informatica Marketing Data Lake, enables customers to improve marketing ROI, customer loyalty and sales force effectiveness. Together, the two companies transform fragmented marketing data into business value.”

The Marketing Data Lake can be leveraged by enterprises across all industries. Use cases include:
· Account based marketing (ABM) – Total account visibility is a powerful concept but a tough nut to crack as most of today’s marketing apps take a lead-centric rather than an account-centric view. Informatica Marketing Data Lake supports ABM by combining data from different sources to generate an account-based view of cross-channel marketing interactions, thus enabling easier spotting of cross-sell and other opportunities.

· Improved revenue modeling – For advanced analysis from predictive forecast modeling to product basket and propensity to buy analysis, the Informatica Marketing Data Lake simplifies the data pipeline management for data scientists and gives them access to all the data not just partial extracts. Data scientists get to choose their favorite weapon of choice, such as Revolution, H20 or SparkR.

· Segmentation and personalization – Informatica Marketing Data Lake can help split target audiences into ever more granular meaningful segments based on a wide range of relevant variables and insights into individual customer behaviors across touch points and channels, as well as their propensity to buy as scored by predictive modeling.

· “Contact Us” form abandonment – The “contact us” form is a website’s “closer,” and getting someone to submit a form can potentially be worth millions in sales. Views into who is starting to fill out these forms but not finishing them, and what potential revenue each person represents, can guide strategies for driving form completion and alternative ways of following up with the prospects.