Why should data drive your marketing team

If you’re like most tech leaders, you understand the importance of data-driven decision-making.

After all, when it comes to making strategic decisions about your company’s direction, marketing efforts, and product development, there’s no substitute for hard data.

However, gathering and analyzing that data can be challenging, especially if you’re relying on traditional marketing analytics tools. And if your marketing team doesn’t have the right data, they can struggle to make the best marketing choices.

The biggest challenge companies face regarding data gathering is that they often have too much data to process. With so much information coming in from various sources, it can be difficult to determine which data is essential and which can be ignored.

Another issue is that traditional analytics tools aren’t always able to keep up with the volume of data. As a result, decision-makers may not have access to all the information they need to make informed decisions.

A BI platform can help overcome these challenges by providing a centralized location for all your data.

With a BI platform, you can easily gather data from all your sources, including internal databases, marketing automation tools, and social media platforms.

The platform will also help you quickly analyze the data so you can get a clear picture of what’s happening in your business. This can help you make better decisions about your marketing efforts, product development, and overall strategy.

So, are you ready to supercharge your marketing analytics with a BI platform? Here’s everything you need to know about how a BI platform can help you take your marketing analytics to the next level.

What is a business intelligence platform?

At its core, a business intelligence platform is a software solution that helps users collect, organize, and analyze data.

BI platforms typically include features like data visualization tools and dashboards that make it easy to see and understand complex data sets. Additionally, most BI platforms offer some type of reporting functionality that allows users to generate custom reports based on their specific needs.

There are many different types of BI platforms on the market, but they all share one common goal: to help businesses make better decisions by providing them with access to accurate and actionable data insights.

How can a BI platform help you boost your marketing analytics?

There are many ways in which a BI platform can help you boost your marketing analytics.

Collecting data from all marketing channels

First and foremost, a BI platform can help you collect data from all of your marketing channels in one central location. This is valuable because it eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures that your data is always up-to-date. This means that you’ll never have to worry about missing a critical piece of data that could impact your marketing decisions.

Additionally, a BI platform can help you automatically collect data from third-party sources, such as social media platforms and marketing automation tools. This can save you significant time and effort because you won’t need to manually export data from these sources and import it into your BI platform.

Clean data for best results

Another way a BI platform can help you boost your marketing analytics is by providing you with clean data.

When data is “clean,” it means that it is accurate, consistent, and complete. This is important because it ensures that your marketing reports are based on reliable information.

For example, one data source may store state names as the actual names, and another might store that same data as abbreviations. If a user combined those two data sets and then tried to filter the data by state, the system might ignore one set of data and only present the other.

BI tools can prevent this issue through data editing and data cleansing. Some of this can be automated, but in other situations, this data cleansing needs to be user-led. Either way, this cleansing is something that can only be done in a BI tool.

If your data is not clean, it can lead to inaccurate insights and decision-making. A BI platform can help you avoid this by providing you with data that has been cleansed and normalized. This means that you can be confident that your data is accurate and reliable.

Analyzing data to identify insights

Once your data is collected, a BI platform can help you quickly analyze it to identify insights that can inform your marketing decisions.

For example, let’s say you want to know which of your marketing channels is driving the most traffic to your website. With a BI platform, you can easily create a report that shows your website traffic by channel. This report would give you a clear picture of which channels are performing well and which ones need improvement.

Additionally, a BI platform can help you segment your data to better understand your customers. For instance, you could segment your data by customer location, age, or gender. This would allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns more likely to resonate with your target audience.

Generating custom reports

Most BI platforms offer some type of reporting functionality that allows users to generate custom reports based on their specific needs. This is valuable because it allows you to get the exact information you need to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.

One example of a custom report you could generate is a marketing campaign performance report. This type of report would show you how well your marketing campaigns perform in terms of key metrics like reach, engagement, and conversion rate.

Additionally, you could use a BI platform to create a customer lifetime value (LTV) report. This type of report would show you how much each of your customers is worth to your business over the course of their lifetime. This information could inform your marketing budget and help you allocate your resources more effectively.

A BI platform can even go beyond reports and translate data directly into visualizations, which allows for much more flexible, ad-hoc reporting. Instead of generating a numerical report on marketing data, the marketing team could build a dashboard that has all their key metrics tracked on it.

With this dashboard, there’d be no reason to run reports—users can get real-time data instead of relying on days-old data from a report they’re just now getting. They can monitor their KPIs anytime, making paper reports a thing of the past.

Tips for implementing a BI platform for marketing analytics

If you’re thinking about implementing a BI platform to boost your marketing analytics, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Make sure you have the necessary data sources in place

Before you can start using a BI platform for marketing analytics, you must ensure you have all the necessary data. Many companies make the mistake of implementing a BI platform without first ensuring they have all the data they need to get started.

As a result, they’re often left with incomplete or inaccurate data sets that don’t provide them with the insights they need to make informed decisions. This can leave them at a competitive disadvantage and can ultimately hurt their bottom line.

2. Set up a data governance framework

A data governance framework is essential for a BI platform because it helps ensure that your data is always accurate and up-to-date. This is important because you need accurate data to make informed marketing decisions.

A data governance framework also helps ensure that your data is properly organized and easy to access. This makes it easier for you to analyze your data and identify insights that can help improve your marketing strategy.

3. Work with a reputable BI vendor

When you’re ready to implement a BI platform, it’s important to work with a reputable BI vendor. There are a lot of different BI platforms on the market, and not all of them are equally good.

A good BI vendor will be able to help you select the right platform for your needs and ensure that it’s properly configured and installed. Make sure the company offers ongoing support—ensuring that your BI platform is always up-to-date and running smoothly.

4. Train your team on how to use the platform

Once your BI platform is up and running, it’s important to train your team on how to use it. Many people are intimidated by data and analytics, so it’s important to provide them with the training they need to feel confident using the platform.

Whether your marketing team is skilled in data or not, they should be able to understand how to use the BI platform to get the insights they need to make informed decisions.

5. Use data to inform your decisions

Finally, it’s important to remember that a BI platform is only as good as the decisions you make with the data it provides. It’s essential to use data to inform your decisions, but you shouldn’t rely on it alone. Data should be used in conjunction with your own experience and expertise to make the best decisions for your business.

The bottom line

If you want to take your marketing analytics to the next level, you need to use a business intelligence platform.

A BI platform can help you collect accurate and actionable data insights from all of your marketing channels in one central location. Additionally, a BI platform provides powerful visualization tools that make it easy to see trends, patterns, and correlations in your data—insights that would be difficult or impossible to glean from looking at raw data sets.