5 Ways to Level Up Your Enterprise Data Strategy

Enterprise marketing is entering a high-stakes data era where the difference between growth and stagnation often comes down to the strength of your data strategy.

The industry is being shaped by privacy regulations, rising customer expectations, and shrinking attention spans. This means that traditional methods like 3rd-party cookies, isolated databases, and surface-level analytics are no longer effective.

Marketers can’t afford to rely on fragmented data and hope for actionable insights. What’s needed is a unified, enterprise-grade approach to data, one that bridges departments, aligns with business goals, and meets the new standard of privacy-conscious precision.

Done right, an enterprise data strategy becomes a revenue driver. It powers sharper audience targeting, boosts ROI, accelerates campaign velocity, and creates the foundation for scalable, future-proof growth.

In this article, we’ll unpack five practical, forward-looking strategies to level up your enterprise data game and finally turn potential into performance.

What Is an Enterprise Data Strategy?

An enterprise data strategy is a comprehensive framework that guides how an organization captures, manages, integrates, and activates data to achieve business objectives. 

For senior marketers, it serves as the connective tissue between marketing ambitions and operational execution, turning data from a static resource into a strategic asset.

The foundation of any enterprise data strategy includes five core components:

1. Data governance: Establishes policies and accountability around access, privacy, compliance, and security.
2. Data collection: Defines what data is gathered, from which channels (CRM, website, email, media platforms), and why.
3. Data quality: Ensures accuracy, consistency, and usability to support informed decision-making.
4. Data integration: Breaks down silos by linking systems such as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), CRMs, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, and marketing automation tools.
5. Data activation: Applies cleaned and structured data to real-world use cases, fueling segmentation, targeting, and campaign performance.

When executed strategically, a data strategy supports key business goals: driving revenue growth, improving customer experience, and increasing operational efficiency. 

For marketing leaders, this means being equipped to plan with clarity, execute with precision, and measure with confidence across channels, campaigns, and customer journeys.

Why Enterprise Data Strategy Matters for B2B Marketers

B2B marketing brings its own set of complexities: protracted sales cycles, specialized audiences, and high-stakes decision-making. In this environment, the value of a well-designed data strategy becomes especially clear.

Rather than reacting to fragmented insights, B2B marketers need coordinated, real-time access to data that supports:

• Personalization at scale: Delivering relevant messaging across each stage of the buyer journey.
• Lead nurturing: Tracking engagement and adapting content strategies to move prospects forward.
• Account-based marketing (ABM): Orchestrating campaigns across departments to target decision-makers with precision.
• Sales alignment: Creating shared metrics, visibility, and workflows between marketing and sales functions.

A mature enterprise data strategy provides the visibility and control required to navigate complex B2B ecosystems. It helps senior marketers shift from campaign-by-campaign thinking to a longer-term, data-informed approach that aligns with enterprise goals and positions marketing as a key driver of business performance.

How to Uplevel Your Enterprise Data Strategy

The following five tactics will help you elevate your enterprise data strategy.

1. Bridging Strategy and Activation

Many enterprises invest heavily in developing a data strategy only to hit a wall when it comes time to operationalize it. The gap between strategy and activation is one of the most persistent challenges facing senior marketing leaders today. 

Often, the strategy lives in PowerPoint decks while execution teams work from disconnected tools, vague objectives, or outdated data.

This disconnect stems from several factors: unclear ownership, siloed data infrastructure, overcomplicated martech stacks, and a lack of alignment between IT and marketing. 

Without a direct path from high-level strategy to day-to-day actions, even the most robust data plan struggles to deliver results.

To bridge this gap, senior marketers can take the following practical steps:

• Start with specific business use-cases: Define clear scenarios where data will drive impact. For example, using behavioural data from your website to trigger personalized email sequences, or leveraging intent data to prioritize high-value accounts for sales outreach. These use cases help translate strategy into outcomes.
• Develop a data integration roadmap: Ensure systems are connected to support the flow of data across platforms. This includes syncing your CRM with your CDP, integrating marketing automation tools, and aligning analytics dashboards. The goal is a unified data environment that supports real-time activation.
• Select platforms that support your objectives: Choose tools such as demand-side platforms (DSPs), CDPs, or analytics platforms that align with your strategic priorities. For example, if one goal is to increase media efficiency in ABM campaigns, your DSP should allow for CRM audience onboarding and segmentation based on firmographic or behavioural attributes.

Consider a B2B enterprise with a large CRM database wanting to improve its programmatic ad performance. The marketing team can align with IT to integrate the CRM with their DSP, enabling real-time audience segmentation. They can use past purchase behaviour and engagement scores to create lookalike audiences and retarget warm leads with custom creative. A potential result is an increase in qualified leads and a significant reduction in cost per acquisition.

Closing the strategy-to-activation gap requires both leadership and clarity. Marketers who move from abstract goals to well-defined, cross-functional use-cases are in a stronger position to convert their data investments into measurable business outcomes.

2. Activating 1st-Party Data in Programmatic Advertising

For enterprise marketers, 1st-party data is the defining strategic advantage in programmatic advertising, powering precision, personalization, and performance.

Here’s how 1st-party data elevates programmatic performance:

• Custom audience targeting: With rich behavioural and demographic data from your CRM or customer portal, you can create precise audience segments, such as high-value customers, lapsed buyers, or leads in specific verticals, and reach them across channels with programmatic media.
• Dynamic creative optimization: By linking user attributes (industry, past purchases, location) to ad content, marketers can serve creative that adapts in real-time, leading to higher relevance and engagement.
• Retargeting and re-engagement campaigns: First-party data enables smarter retargeting. If a prospect abandoned a demo request form, they can be served tailored messages that guide them back into the funnel, rather than generic brand ads.

For example, a SaaS company can upload its segmented CRM data into a privacy-compliant onboarding platform, scrubbing personal identifiers and matching users via hashed emails or device IDs. Once in the DSP, marketers can build audience pools such as “trial users with low engagement” or “enterprise clients up for renewal.” These segments can then be used for tailored programmatic campaigns featuring renewal incentives or feature highlights.

For senior marketers, the ability to efficiently activate 1st-party data is what separates high-performing campaigns from the rest.

3. Diversifying With Emerging Channel Opportunities

Traditional B2B channels like email, search, and LinkedIn are showing diminishing returns. Inboxes are overloaded, search is competitive, and LinkedIn’s costs are rising, especially for niche audiences.

To break through, senior marketers are turning to emerging programmatic channels that offer new ways to engage decision-makers:

• Connected TV (CTV) delivers high-impact brand messaging with the targeting precision of digital—ideal for building awareness in long B2B sales cycles.
• Programmatic audio and podcasts offer a direct line to busy professionals during commutes or work sessions, supporting thought leadership and brand recall.
• Digital out-of-home (DOOH) brings your message into physical spaces like airports and offices, reinforcing campaigns across key moments and locations.

Data Strategy Considerations

Entering these channels requires thoughtful adjustments to your data approach:

• Identity resolution: Matching offline and online identities is key, especially for cross-channel measurement. Work with partners who support privacy-safe identity graphs and persistent IDs.
• Targeting precision: Ensure your 1st-party and 3rd-party data partners can segment by business attributes (e.g., job title, industry, company size) within these channels.
• Attribution planning: Emerging channels often play an upper- or mid-funnel role, so rethinking attribution models to include assisted conversions or brand lift becomes critical.

“Great B2B marketing goes beyond collecting insights,” says Kenny Ginapp, Director of Sales, Enterprise, at StackAdapt. “What sets top marketers apart is the ability to turn those insights into action. That’s where activation comes in. And the partners you choose make all the difference. With partners purpose-built for B2B, you amplify outcomes, gain new visibility into the customer journey, and prove the real impact of every paid investment.”

Diversifying your channel mix opens the door to higher engagement, better reach, and new ways to influence the B2B buyer journey. When paired with a strong data foundation, these programmatic opportunities can help extend your strategy beyond the browser and into the everyday environments where decisions are actually being made.

4. Aligning Marketing and Data Teams

Even with a strong data strategy on paper, execution often falters due to internal misalignment. Marketing and data teams typically operate in separate lanes, with different priorities, tools, and success metrics. This disconnect leads to inefficient processes, inconsistent data, and missed opportunities for performance gains.

Common barriers include:

• Departmental silos that limit knowledge sharing and collaboration
• Misaligned KPIs that prioritize operational output over strategic impact
• Lack of shared accountability for how data supports marketing outcomes

To overcome these challenges, senior marketers need to lead a shift toward collaboration and joint ownership. Here are practical steps to drive that alignment:

• Create cross-functional data councils: Bring together stakeholders from marketing, IT, data science, and sales to align on data use-cases, governance, and activation plans. Regular working sessions help surface issues early and keep strategy execution on track.
• Establish shared KPIs: Define metrics that reflect both data quality (e.g., accuracy, freshness, completeness) and marketing performance (e.g., lead conversion, campaign ROI). When teams are measured by the same outcomes, collaboration becomes a necessity, not a favour.
• Secure executive sponsorship: Buy-in from senior leadership helps dissolve turf wars and gives strategic weight to integration efforts. A visible champion can remove blockers and reinforce the business value of cross-team alignment.

5. Focusing on Privacy, Compliance, and Trust

A well-structured enterprise data strategy is one of the most effective tools for staying ahead of regulatory demands. It creates the foundation for responsible data practices, embedding compliance into everyday operations rather than treating it as an afterthought.

To support a privacy-first approach, marketers should consider the following practices:

• Use secure, privacy-preserving onboarding partners and processes: These allow you to activate 1st-party data in programmatic environments without exposing personally identifiable information. Data is matched and anonymized within a secure, privacy-compliant environment.
• Be transparent with clients and prospects: Clear communication about how data is collected, stored, and used builds trust. Whether it’s through updated privacy notices or permission-based engagement, transparency strengthens brand credibility.
• Conduct regular audits and compliance checks: Ongoing reviews help identify gaps, adapt to new regulations, and ensure that both internal systems and external vendors remain compliant.

Adopting a privacy-first mindset improves marketing’s impact. When customers know their data is handled with care, they’re more likely to engage. When your systems are built for compliance from the ground up, you’re able to innovate confidently, without risk slowing you down.

Ultimately, privacy, compliance, and trust are essential to performance. A strong data strategy helps marketing leaders navigate this new environment with agility and integrity.

Get Started With Your Enterprise Data Strategy

Putting these five strategies into action builds a resilient, data-driven foundation for your organization. The right enterprise data strategy delivers stronger ROI, deeper audience insight, and scalable growth while adapting to a rapidly evolving privacy landscape.

StackAdapt brings everything together in one place: its Data Hub, an AI-powered programmatic engine, and native email tools. The Data Hub consolidates 1st-party data from CRMs and other sources directly into the platform, turning it into real-time insights on audiences, conversions, and ROI. 

From there, marketers can orchestrate cross-channel campaigns, while AI keeps fine-tuning targeting and creative on the fly, so everything works in sync within a single workflow.

Senior marketers ready to put strategy into action: consider using StackAdapt to unlock connected customer experiences powered by 1st‑party data and AI-driven orchestration. 

Request a demo today and see how combining StackAdapt’s Data Hub, programmatic engine, and email activation in one platform turns enterprise data into measurable business outcomes.