DataKitchen recently helped a global pharmaceutical giant seeking to drive top-line growth by modernizing its marketing operations. The project included a migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, integrations with numerous internal and third-party data sources, and a continuous flow of data. The plan initially required eighteen months for implementation. Using the DataKitchen DataOps Platform, which automates deployment, controls quality and supports Agile development of analytics, the company was able to start delivering value in six weeks and completed the migration in about one third the time.
The Challenge of Marketing Automation at Scale
The company faced numerous difficulties when implementing marketing automation for multiple global business units:
- Distributed Data – The company’s marketing analytics and customer data were distributed in many specialized systems that do not easily talk to each other. This made it challenging to link customer data from one system with another. Customers engage through emails, partner websites, advertisements, campaigns and across product lines. Each of these touchpoints produces a continuous stream of fine-grained opt-in/opt-out requests which all must be consolidated and synchronized. Cross-referencing customer data with third-party databases also provides valuable segmentation information.
- Supporting Agile – The company lacked the technical infrastructure to implement Agile development of data flows and analytics. Using a slow and inflexible development process prevented them from keeping up with the fast-paced requirements of the sales and marketing teams.
- Iterating on Data Quality – Analysts had trouble specifying data quality rules until they saw the data. In a non-agile environment, this caused requirements to keep changing, causing delays.
- Continuous Change Requests – Once a system is operational, users are inspired to request additional data sources, segmentations and other enhancements. With long development cycles, it was difficult for the team to keep up with the users’ continuous demands.
Summary
Prior to the adoption of the DataKitchen Platform, the company found that these challenges detracted from the effectiveness of their marketing programs. DataKitchen helped this company overcome these difficulties by applying DataOps to marketing automation. In the next edition of our blog, we’ll discuss how using our DataOps Platform improved the flexibility, agility and data quality of this pharmaceutical company’s marketing automation system.
