With new marketing and communication channels appearing, there are always new martech solutions popping up that aim to help marketers wrangle the beast that is Big Data. But the biggest challenge remains aggregating and making sense of all that data being collected across these channels and coming up with a plan of action that capitalizes on all of it.

Modern Marketing Today talked with Elizabeth Gallagher, CRO at Lineate (formerly Thumbtack Technology), about realistic approaches to data aggregation and analysis for marketers and what kind of technology they can look forward to in coming years. Lineate is a software development firm that helps its clients leverage their own data to build smarter platforms.

When asked about the marketing industry’s current adoption level of data analytics, Elizabeth said, “What is clear is that now that everybody has spent so much time gathering data is that now converting that into actionable insight and using it to close the gap between company and audience is critical for everybody to succeed at this point.” This has proven to be a common pain point across verticals; companies are trying to understand how to leverage this mountain of data they know they are supposed to have.

But in order to find those actionable insights that Elizabeth mentioned, more than just standard demographic data from a target audience is needed. To really understand a customer, behavioral and social data must also be incorporated into the equation. And because aggregating all that data can be costly and time-consuming, it’s incredibly difficult to produce a truly tailored experience for a customer.

Elizabeth noted, “You’ve got marketers who are using upwards of 17 different tools to accomplish their basic marketing outreach, and pulling all that data together even just on the marketing activity alone is just incredibly challenging.”

But the future of martech offers hope to marketers drowning in a sea of data and new marketing channels. Elizabeth thinks that the key to creating a successful product is ensuring that it’s flexible and able to easily fold in data from emerging marketing channels. She referenced the adoption of Instagram as a new sales channel, an option that wasn’t even on the table three years ago.

Marketers will be looking to that nimbleness and flexibility to keep up with the ever-growing pile of data with which they have to work. She stated, “Being able to build a system that allows for new tools to enter the mix seamlessly is where people are going to succeed.”