Data-driven marketing for the lean organization

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Benefits of using BI in marketing
  3. New BI solutions for the lean marketing team
  4. Beyond the basic marketing KPIs
  5. Key takeaways
  6. About Kristina J. Yee

1. Summary

Data-driven marketing generates a lot of talk these days and business intelligence (BI) technology solutions continue to garner significant funding and traction. But studies show that organizations large and small are still in the early stages of learning how to integrate their data stores with their current systems, to use the data once they access it, and to visualize and communicate the resulting marketing analysis. In marketing, most leaders are still using field data to report on past performance, rather than as a tool for maximizing future performance.

True data-driven decision-making enables companies to move from a reactive orientation to a predictive and proactive one – from understanding what you are doing compared to the competition to knowing what to do to outsmart them. A new generation of relatively low-cost and easy-to-set-up BI analysis tools can help smaller companies or those with lean marketing budgets adopt this data-driven approach.

The goal of this report is to help marketing leaders set up a general framework for this. Key findings from our analysis include:

  • Advanced BI functions are now accessible to the majority of organizations with costs around 20 percent of marketing budgets. Cloud-based marketing analytics tools are the fastest and easiest way to get BI up and running well. Smart cloud implementations can alleviate marketing’s dependency on IT and vendor lock-in.
  • The benefits to even basic data-driven decision-making within the marketing organization outweigh the investment in marketing infrastructure required as a precursor to advanced data utilization. The enablement of advanced KPI’s such as real-time conversion rates by channel and customer psychographic profiles result in an organization’s ability to move to a more focused and nimble marketing orientation versus the scattershot, blanket-marketing and hearsay (what sales thinks works) approaches of the past.
  • While analytical skills are undoubtedly useful for today’s marketing executive, data utilization and business intelligent solutions in marketing are evolving to make it easier for the non-technical but still strategically minded business manager to use advanced analytics to identify patterns, optimize plans and maximize budgets.
  • While tools such as Tableau have a relatively low price point, they may require more analytical training than a drag-and-drop Domo dashboard solution. Since the greatest value of BI is measuring multiple campaign results over time, budgeting and staffing have to maintain a particular system over time.

 

 

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