While marketers have strived to be more data-driven throughout the years, in today's digital-first world, there are no excuses for leaving data on the table. Every customer interaction, click, and purchase generates data, offering valuable insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences, interests, and needs.

Yet, many organizations still struggle to harness the power of their data. Why? Fragmentation. While there is more data available, there are also more data silos than ever before. Data silos — where information is scattered across multiple tools, teams, or platforms — can prevent your organization from gaining a holistic view of its customers and completing the holy grail of a Customer 360 profile.

This is where unified data comes in and is a competitive advantage for organizations that know how to get from silo to synergy. By integrating disparate data sources into a single, cohesive view, your organization can unlock actionable insights, boost marketing return on investment (ROI), and drive sustained business growth by leveraging data to make intelligent decisions. Unified data isn’t just an operational efficiency — it’s a competitive necessity in today’s market. So we’ll dive deeper into to why it matters for marketers.

Why Unified Data Matters for Marketing ROI

Unified data is the foundation of smarter marketing. It eliminates inefficiencies, powers personalization, and helps marketers make data-informed decisions. Don't just take my word for it — a McKinsey study found that businesses leveraging unified data to inform their strategies achieve a 15% lift in marketing ROI on average, thanks to better decision-making and targeted campaigns.

Disparate data can block decision making, whereas a single source of truth ensures your marketing teams work with accurate and consistent data, enabling them to allocate budgets effectively and focus on strategies that yield the highest ROI.

Connected, unified data provides a 360-degree view of customers, allowing your business to create personalized campaigns that resonate, improving engagement and conversion rates. As your organization continues to focus on personalization and CRO strategies, it’s critical to build a sound data strategy as part of those efforts, to make your marketing more powerful and more accurate. Organizations that use unified customer data see a 20–30% increase in revenue by delivering personalized and relevant marketing experiences that drive higher customer engagement.

With a focus on more tailored and intelligent campaigns and marketing efforts, reporting on campaign success and learnings is the gasoline we need to pour on the fire. Today, 74% of marketers say they spend more time wrangling data than analyzing it, making it difficult to produce timely and accurate performance reports that link marketing activities to key business metrics like ROI and customer retention rates

When data is unified, it can help to streamline your reporting, ensuring that insights are accessible and relevant when needed. With centralized data, your marketers can clearly tie campaigns to business outcomes, such as revenue growth and customer retention. This eliminates guesswork and focuses on precise, actionable insights that can inform your next campaign development and execution, making every marketing effort smarter than the last.

Knowing that unified data is the answer to a lot of your marketing and digital problems is the first step, but how do you go further, truly unlocking the unified data advantage?

Great Question!

First you should conduct a data audit or work with Velir and Brooklyn Data to perform a data maturity assessment. This will identify where your data resides and evaluate its quality and relevance. The assessment will then inform a roadmap for data activation and integration.

What you’ll most likely learn from the audit is that you need to invest in new tools. The tools you need will vary based on the use cases you have but you may need a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or a Data Warehouse to integrate and centralize your data to ensure it’s accessible across various teams.

Once your data is unified, it will be critical to adopt a customer-centric approach to all marketing so that you can use your data to understand customer journeys and tailor marketing efforts accordingly, while also empowering teams to monitor the ROI of campaigns using unified data, and refining strategies based on performance insights.

Unified Data: Your Key to Marketing Success

Unified data is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a business imperative for organizations aiming to maximize marketing ROI and fuel sustainable growth. By breaking down silos and leveraging a 360-degree customer view, you can create more effective campaigns, improve customer retention, and ultimately drive revenue. The journey toward unified data may require upfront investment, but the rewards far outweigh the costs. The result? Marketing strategies that don’t just perform — they transform!