The Case For Unified Data: Everything in One Place

Discussion at a recent publishing conference centered on the difficulty of bringing print and digital together into a unified database. Most publishers don’t have the technology or grasp to make it a reality.

I’ll let you in on a secret: It is possible to have your print and digital data in one database.

We’ve done it for almost 20 years.

It’s essential that you do, too.

Publishing by definition has a print component. For most publishers their brand began as a printed magazine and their core audience is made up of print subscribers.

The rise of digital products left publishers with a lot of disconnected data, struggling to integrate with a print database.  Some of the digital content saw crossover from print subscribers, but what if it wasn’t? How can you know? It’s almost impossible to understand where your traffic is coming from if you can’t see everything in one place.

Several workarounds by publishers and audience development managers involve pulling data from separate data silos for reporting purposes. Even databases that purport to be ‘unified’ aren’t unifying the actual data. Their data ‘unifies’ when passed through a dashboard for reporting and query purposes.

Your audience is made up of individuals; not data files, not products. The real solution is to begin at that individual level and attach their print and digital activities to a personal data record. Integrated data presents a clear picture of your audience.

All of your data in a unified database allows you to:

1. Capitalize on trends in audience interaction. A rapid response to changes in product engagement, whether growth or decline, means all the difference in the world.

2. Detect gaps in engagement. How efficiently can you identify people who have attended a live event but aren’t a subscriber? How many of them have registered for your next event? It’s a cumbersome and time-consuming project to pull the data from separate places.

3. Accurately report numbers for each product and for cross product engagement.

4. Produce a brand audit without duplication.

5. Grow beyond your audited audience with accurate tracking and understanding. A larger audience is more appealing to advertisers, which also makes your sales people happy.

Stamats Data Management provides award-winning audience management for print and digital fulfillment. We use a fully integrated data management system, which means Everything in One Place. If you’re tired of patchwork and workarounds that don’t work, we can help.