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Nearly every business relies on data to boost a department’s effectiveness, but it’s unfortunate that most of this data can’t be used in its original format. To top it off, your data is distributed across multiple platforms and devices. You can solve these problems and more with ETL.
What is ETL?
ETL is an acronym that stands for extract, transform, and load. It’s a three-step process that starts with data extraction, which acquires data from a particular source. Once collected in a raw format, the data is transformed by stripping it down, cleaning it, and finally harmonizing it.
The final step is loading the data into a database that includes tools that analyze it. Marketing ETL tools specifically collects all data from numerous marketing sources, like social media, Google ads, and eCommerce sites, and analyzes them together, saving you time and money.
How do ETL Tools Boost Marketing Strategies?
Many companies use data to enhance the efficiency of their extraction and distribution systems. There’s so much data that can be utilized within a business, but so little of it is used. You can’t just extract data from your social media and expect to see growth on your website.
To scale across all of your platforms, you’ll need to group and organize your data. You may be attracting a different target demographic on all of your profiles, or you could gain insight from one platform that you can’t with another. All of this data is essential for overall business growth.
How Can ETL Benefit Marketers?
We know that having data available all in one place can boost your strategy, but what are the specific reasons to use ETL in marketing analytics, and how does it benefit marketers?
ETL Improves Data Quality
ETL isn’t all about collecting data; it’s about the quality of the data you’re collecting. Marketers can remove blind spots in their reporting by cataloging their discoveries. This results in more relevant data that businesses can use for future marketing projects and advertising strategies.
ETL Offers Consistency
All brands need to stay consistent, but this phenomenon doesn’t start and end with logos and font colors. Marketing data also has to follow a universal standard to make it easy to look up. Once data consistency is present throughout the company, archiving becomes simple.
ETL is Incredibly Fast
A manual data organization process is rife with mistakes and misunderstandings. Even if your team is perfect, it’ll still take them a long time to look through all of that data. ETL is a mostly automatic process that helps you build a complete picture of your marketing channels.
ETL Provides Timely Access
Marketers know they have to react to data quickly, but that becomes impossible without real-time updates. ETL doesn’t just populate your data with lightning-fast speeds. It also helps you make sense of it. That way, you can improve the speed of decision-making further.
ETL Boosts Overall Efficiency
With one dashboard, marketing teams don’t have to waste time logging into multiple systems to integrate data. Instead, they can use that free time speaking to the customer and coming up with the best marketing strategies possible, thanks to fast reporting and consistent data.
ETL Can Produce a High ROI
When marketing teams use ETL tools, they can replace manual transformers and expensive custom coding. If the ETL tool has a drag and drop interface, teams will benefit from a fast tool, more accurate data processing, and scalability, which leads to a high return on investment.
ETL Focuses on Key Metrics
Customizable ETL marketing tools can track metrics that are important to you. For example, digital marketers can track click-through rate and cost-per-acquisition, and content marketers can monitor blog traffic and returning visitors. Or you can choose to stay on top of everything.
You may also like: 4 Marketing Analytics Tips to Grow Your Business
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