What Can Managed Database Services Do for You?

Data drives every aspect of your marketing strategy. From coordinating lead gen activities to understanding your customers’ behavior to putting your buyers’ lifetime value into perspective, your marketing database plays a key role in your organization’s growth.

Why Your Database Matters

Information-gathering alone is not enough; you also need to be able to make sense of the knowledge you gain. Without intelligent construction and disciplined management, a database is like a textbook without an index or table of contents – you have all the information in your hands, but you can’t make it usable.
With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what a database does and why it’s so important:

• Integration – Your data has to flow easily from system to system to derive meaningful insights from it. If your sales department’s CRM, your lead scoring software, and your email marketing data are siloed, you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of knowledge.

• Insight – Information is just a series of data points, but database marketing turns it into a story – specifically, the story of your customers. You only get a full view of a customer when you’re able to identify those first steps along the buying journey and gather knowledge over time that leads to an accurate assessment of that customer’s lifetime value.

• Extrapolation – Not only do you learn about individual customers, you also learn about your leads as a whole. Big data analysis that takes a top-down view of your database and draws meaningful inferences from it will let you understand shifts and trends as they happen. With a well-managed database, you’re able to make accurate forecasts and get a better idea of who your best customers are so you can connect with others like them.

• Speed – A well-managed database doesn’t take days or weeks to give you results on new data requests. It works in real time so you get the information you need when you need it, not after it’s too late to act.

Meeting Your Database Needs with Managed Services

Knowing you need a marketing database and managing one are two different prospects. While it’s possible to build an in-house solution, that’s a costly and labor-intensive option. It’s also not guaranteed to work as expected, and failures during late-stage database construction can be catastrophic to your marketing success. There’s another option that saves you time while protecting your organization from the risks inherent in building your own system or trying to catch your personnel up to speed: managed services.

Managed database services give you cost-effective expertise. Instead of pushing your IT team to meet the technological challenges of creating an in-house marketing database or making a bewildering array of platforms work together seamlessly, you entrust the task to professionals who deal with database-driven marketing challenges every day. They’re already up to date on the latest technology, trends, and industry guidelines. Instead of laboriously cutting through the undergrowth, you turn onto a six-lane highway that gets you where you need to go quickly.