In the field of marketing, the concept of data flow refers to how a company’s IT system is continuously and automatically fed with a large volume of data, potentially used for marketing purposes. From a broader perspective, the data used or generated by marketing constitutes only one part of the data flow. The latter encompasses the collection of internal company data (such as web analytics, sales figures, customer data, etc.) as well as, potentially, data from external sources (partners, open data, etc.).

The data flow can, for example, provide marketing information to a dashboard or an automation system. Optimizing the data flow is primarily a technical and IT challenge, aiming to maximize the efficiency of IT resources by ensuring optimal technical data processing, while guaranteeing that only relevant and essential data is considered.