• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 28, 2019

Marketers still struggle to determine what motivates consumers to make a purchase or take another action. Bringing together a variety of data sources allows marketers to follow consumers through the buying process.

Salesforce purchased the artificial intelligence analytics company Datorama for a reported $800 million in July 2018. Since then the company has been working to integrate and build out new services. The company is working to build Datorama into all its services.

The integration now supports the ability to capture, interpret and classify marketing data, along with sales, weather or economic information from hundreds of marketing technology platforms -- and there are hundreds, if not thousands.

The open platform brings in data from all sources. Scott Brinker at Chiefmartec.com estimates there are about 6,829 marketing technology options.

The ability to connect data from any one or more of these systems help marketers to understand the impact data can have on their brands and business.

Marketers can now view and integrate organic social media conversations -- as well as mobile and email data -- into the platform, to determine how the sentiment influences campaigns and sales.  

On average, companies use 15 sources of data to power marketing, according to Jon Suarez-Davis, SVP product marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but it’s not uncommon for a company to have data coming in from thousands of data sources, from email to social to search and ecommerce and CRM systems -- not to mention data coming from agency partners.  

A CMO at one of the world’s largest consumer products goods companies said the business uses about 75 data sources and more than a dozen analytic and measurement systems, Suarez-Davis said.

Foundational challenges remain. Jay Wilder, head of product marketing at Dataroma, points to the importance of finding a way to identify customer likes and dislikes. It makes it easier by integrating data from CRM systems, in-store point-of-sale platforms, and online orders — to name a few.

So for Dataroma the focus remains on bridging the gap between IT and marketing, simplifying the connection of data within a company, and taking action on insights in the moment, Wilder said.

The integration allows marketers to see side-by-side how campaigns on Google, Twitter and Facebook perform, as well as determining how specific campaigns perform.