According to the most recent estimates, approximately 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day.
That’s a lot of data.
Your business will not collect that much data in a day (we heaved a sigh of relief as well!), but every organization certainly does both collect and generate a significant amount of data that must be parsed through, sorted out, organized, and reported on. Without it, there’s no way of knowing what’s working and what’s not or how to drive the business forward successfully.
Data is a valuable commodity, and businesses collect it from multiple sources. But just having the data isn’t enough: You need to put it to work to create a comprehensive view that centralizes your data and makes it both usable and accessible.
This is where data integration comes in.
What Is Data Integration?
In the most basic terms, data integration is the process of collecting data in a variety of formats from multiple (typically disparate) sources and putting it in a uniform format that can be used for reporting and analysis. Consolidating disparate data sets gives the business a comprehensive view of operations, customers, and market landscape.
Data integration typically includes four major steps:
- Data ingestion: Gathering data from various sources
- Data processing: Cleaning, transforming, and otherwise preparing data for analysis
- Data storage: Saving processed data in a way that makes it easy to access and retrieve
- Data management: Overall governance and organization of data to ensure quality, security, and accessibility
You can see then that data integration isn’t just about getting all the information into one place. It includes the creation of a seamless environment that empowers diverse data elements to interact in a meaningful way to support clearer insights, more informed decisions, and business growth.
Why Do We Need Data Integration, Anyway?
Effective business analytics are built on the foundation of data integration. Here’s why that integration is so crucial, especially when it comes to Marketing and Sales teams.
Enhanced Data Accuracy
Integrating data means fewer opportunities for errors and other inconsistencies that you risk when relying on manual data handling. With data integration, you can trust the accuracy and reliability of your analytics for more informed decision-making.
Holistic Insights
Your organization has data from a lot of different touchpoints, including sales transactions, customer interactions, and marketing campaigns. Integrating the data from this multitude of sources provides a far more comprehensive and holistic view of operations, which opens up valuable insights and patterns you wouldn’t otherwise see.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Want that 360-degree view of your customers’ journeys? You need data integration. With combined data from your variety of touchpoints, you’ll be better able to tailor marketing messages to specific customer needs and preferences for a more engaging experience.
Forecasting and Predictive Analysis
A proactive marketing strategy requires accurate forecasting. With data integration, you can leverage historical data from multiple sources that will help your Marketing team anticipate trends, customer behavior, and campaign effectiveness.
Streamlined Workflows
If you’re leveraging data integration, there’s no more need for manual data transfers and reconciliations across all your different systems. With all your data in one unified environment, your team has streamlined workflows, reduced duplication of effort, and the ability to focus instead on meaningful insights and not data inconsistencies.
Better Data Governance
Data integration will ensure your data quality, consistency, and compliance, which in turn boosts better data governance practices. This is especially key for any organization that functions in a highly regulated industry.
The Role of Data Integration in Data Analytics
More than 80 percent of CEOs say they want their company to be more data driven. That’s no surprise when you consider that data-driven organizations experience multiple positive impacts including a faster time to market and more new customers. And in order to become a data-driven organization, you’ve got to start with data analytics. Data analytics is what will help improve a business by optimizing business processes, creating more persuasive marketing campaigns, retaining more employees, and offering greater customer personalization.
What gets your organization to this point of powerful data analytics? If your answer was “data integration,” you’re correct! Data integration is what makes it easier to pull information from various sources, refine it, and compile it into one centralized location to mine for insights.
Which means your next question to answer is: What supports powerful analytics? This far into reading, we hope you too made the connection that it’s data integration. The right tools can help you pull data from top data sources and integrate it into a central location for analyzation, and even ensure that data is consistently refreshed so you know you’re looking at a to-the-moment view of what’s happening in your campaigns, sales, and business as a whole.
Easy Data Integration with ExtendInsights
We get it: Some of you may be clutching your spreadsheets a little tighter right now, reticent to let go of the familiar environment to try to leverage yet another solution that’s supposed to get you exactly the dashboards and reports you need. We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be like that. Spreadsheets are popular for a reason, and at CloudExtend, we believe that if it’s something you like that works, why change?
That’s why we build Excel integration apps that pull your disparate data into one place so you can report on it and feed Power BI dashboards and other visualizations all from the familiar interface of your spreadsheets. ExtendInsights is purpose-built to integrate sources such as HubSpot, Chargebee, Stripe, NetSuite, and Salesforce (with plenty more integrations on the way!) directly into Excel. No new software to learn, no additional password to remember to get into your dashboards. Just open ExtendInsights right in Excel and off you go with data integration and reports that leverage your extensive spreadsheet know-how.
It’s easy to get started, and even easier to build reports. Give it a try now for FREE.