Case Study

After years of struggling to maintain consistent data taxonomy across its brand portfolio, a leading U.S. mortgage provider knew it needed to invest in a well-defined and streamlined marketing taxonomy process. Combining data sources from its various brands had led to major inconsistencies in data taxonomy and reporting.

The team was spending hours creating manual, ad hoc reports to attempt to fill in the gaps, yet the full picture remained incomplete. Marketing leaders knew that to achieve the desired performance tracking across their marketing and advertising programs, they needed to implement an organization-wide data standardization process.

They needed to solve these three challenges:

1. Taxonomy inconsistency across teams.
2. Lack of tools/technologies to enable marketing taxonomy governance and standardization.
3. Major gaps in centralized reporting due to missing performance tracking metadata.

Selecting Claravine as the data standardization tool to help standardize data inputs, naming conventions, and metadata across all digital channels was the first step. But to achieve its goals, getting the implementation right was critical.

Having selected Claravine’s platform, The Data Standards Cloud®, to help modernize its data taxonomy, marketing leaders knew they needed support to gain adoption and define the future-state taxonomy strategy for the enterprise.

They turned to Claravine’s partner, Slalom, to help ensure implementation was done in a way that would set the company up for future success.

Marketing Campaign Taxonomy Assessment and Strategic Roadmap

To build an intentional, strategic program, Slalom and Claravine collaborated to identify gaps in the organization’s current campaign taxonomy and where they could implement best-in-class data standards.

By defining its marketing taxonomy strategy and streamlining data collection, the team would be able to improve its advertising and marketing performance across the board.

In just 6 weeks, the team completed the assessment, which included:

• Taxonomy Assesment & Stakeholder Interviews
• Taxonomy Implementation Roadmap
• Gap Analysis
• Comms & Platform Onboarding Plan
• New Taxonomy Strategy & Design

Starting by understanding the current state, the team was able to identify:

• Uncoordinated taxonomies across teams
• Unclear audience vs. channel distinction
• Disconnect between strategy and activation
• Manual ad-hoc reporting instances
• Existing technology challenges
• Informal Taxonomy roles & responsibility alignment

Following the completion of the discovery phase, Slalom and Claravine worked together to create a comprehensive marketing campaign taxonomy based on best practices, historical performance, and the customer’s ultimate goals.

Taxonomy Design Framework Maps Future-State Data Standards & Governance

Armed with a deep understanding of the current state, the team began building a Taxonomy Design Framework that focused on five key areas and would serve as the building blocks for a new Taxonomy and Data Governance strategy.

Upon project completion, the team was armed with a workable plan custom-built for their business to help them implement a data taxonomy that was usable, standardized, and designed to improve reporting.

Consistent and standardized naming conventions for marketing platforms

• Transitioning from non-standardized processes to a standardized naming convention process improves centralized reporting since data can better answer the questions the teams are looking to answer.

Effective governance over marketing taxonomy

• Using Claravine’s platform, the marketing data operations team can govern the marketing taxonomy elements including naming conventions, URL and lead tracking, and metadata fields.

Roadmap to guide the taxonomy implementation and set timing expectations

• More than just a new taxonomy design, the client was armed with a roadmap to guide the implementation and set timing expectations with leadership, marketing teams, data engineering teams, and business intelligence teams.