Discover your single source of truth
Who owns your brand?
Your brand is more than just a well-designed logo and witty strapline. It’s a story between your consumers and you. A story that you can influence, but in each individual mind, it’s a story that will be read differently.
How you perceive your brand is not the same as how your consumers perceive it, and never will be. The best you can do is hope to get as close to their truth in as you can.
Who owns the truth?
Think of your enterprise as an orchestra, with some of the best musicians in the world. They’re well-trained, well rehearsed, able to produce the best music in the world.
But each section is given a different song to play. The strings have one piece, the brass section another, the percussion yet another.
When you stand in front of them and attempt to conduct, no matter how good that orchestra is, you will end up with a mess. Your audience won’t know what to listen to.
That’s the issue big businesses now face.
Each team performs well as a unit, using multiple sources of data that it considers to be its version of the truth. But across the whole enterprise, those units are misaligned.
You could have -
- Marketing. Crawling social data to understand the conversations around your brand online, basing their reality on that data.
- Market research. Focused on consumer insights gathered from external sources, like surveys and focus groups.
- Customer service. With another perception, as they rely on information gathered from emails, chat, and calls.
Even within your company, the perception of truth changes because each person is fed a different data source, that tells a different story. If you can’t amalgamate into a single truth within your business, how will your consumers ever understand it?
It’s a more common issue than you may think, with 40% of companies saying each department has its own agendas, without support from other departments. That’s over a third with departments playing off different song sheets.
Siloed data causes departments to create their own “truths” to format their communications and justify their results. This creates a broken perception of your brand in your customers’ minds.
What is a single source of truth (SSOT)?
The thing is, the solution for this is actually quite simple - you just need to get all your teams telling the same story. Or playing the same song. To do that, they need to be fed the same operational data. They need a single source of truth.
That means every team, no matter which department, gathers all their business intelligence from the same complete stream of data. Which means complete data integration in one place (typically one analytics platform), and allowing all decision makers access to that data.
It’s swapping data silos to data warehouses, with all data points under one roof.
Only once you have complete data management for your brand, consumers, feedback, etc., will you get a single version of how your brand is perceived by your consumers as a whole.
A single source of truth ensures every player is working from the same song sheet.
A single source of truth, means every department works from the same truth. So the story told to your consumers, and their perception, is consistent and complete.
What can a single source of truth do?
One of the biggest issues we face is ensuring that every team member has all the data they need to optimally perform their job. Currently, they could rely on data analysts to provide the insights they need to take action, and this can cause a bottleneck in the flow of information across the system.
A single source of truth clears that bottleneck. By integrating all the information from your business into one answer, managed by a single platform, you’re making everyone an analyst. It also enables brands to use all the data they have access to. Currently, up to 80% of company data is “untouched” - it’s not used to drive any valuable brand insights. A single source of truth can unlock this data.
While more data can lead to more problems, it can help resolve them too. A single source of truth can help reveal data bias or false correlation that some teams may be working with. Having that holistic view can break those issues apart.
Speeding up your brand actions, creating more intuitive workflows, and helping make data-driven decisions in real time. Across all departments.
A single source of truth for marketing
Marketing is all about promoting benefits. Identifying the issues of your clients, and highlights the solutions your brand has to resolve those pain points. In this case, your single source of truth can be used to identify those problems.
Currently, you could be using social listening to gather conversational data about your brand and competitors. But when you combine that with the issues raised by consumers through emails and customer calls, that can either open up new areas for you to target. Or help you drill down into the finite issues that your potential customers have.
A single source of truth for PR
Brand reputation is everything in comms. Understanding how consumers perceive your brand is essential to protect it from incoming crises.
Currently, that’ll probably involve monitoring news and blogs as well as earned media. But still, what people say on social will be very different to what they say away from the PC. Consumer research and surveys, such as Net Promoter Score®, can be aligned to give you a stronger perception of your brand perception.
A single source of truth for market research
Market research relies on accurate consumer data. Whether surveying audience sectors to measure the impact of recent campaigns, or analyzing trends to help invigorate new product research.
This qualitative research is beneficial, but can take time. If you add that to quantitative data from social analytics, you could add to your insights, with faster data analysis. Plus, the conversational data may help identify topics that you never would have thought of investigating, helping lead your next strand of research.
Getting your team to play to their potential
Once you have mastered your data, and created the truth for your company, you’ll quickly see teams members learning from it. Listening to their colleagues truth and adapting their own.
You could boost personalization in your sales teams, allow your HR departments to create more targeted recruitment ads, enable your research teams with further product insights, help you move towards omni-channel marketing. Give you the closest perception of your brand truth than ever before.
4 different data sources, 4 different truths. But by aligning them in a platform like Talkwalker, you can create one single source of truth for your company.
Talkwalker - a single source of truth solution
How can you create a single source of truth for your enterprise? Talkwalker enables users to integrate other data sources in one place, to help brands create their single source of truth. Customer Data+ allows you to combine client and consumer data alongside media data, to create a complete picture of your brand. Bringing you ever closer to the truth you’ve been looking for.
To request a free trial, and experience the truth of your brand, request a free demo below.
