According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. However, if “data is the new oil,” as mathematician Clive Humby asserts, the real value of data lies not in creating more of it, but in driving smarter decisions with it. While marketers recognize the importance of data analytics in principal, using marketing data to better reach, understand, and serve their customer base is still a significant challenge. They often rely on business intelligence (BI) tools that decipher the various data sources and report what the data is telling them, even if that data is disjointed or served through an inflexible interface. And even when it presents no clearer understanding of ROI. Enter marketing dashboards. This technology combines real-time, mostly unstructured data analytics with the BI tools needed to review past successes and failures and create a go forward strategy that garners real results. These dashboards unify marketing data across all sources (Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, digital marketing, etc.) and provide faster, deeper insights for the data-driven marketer. In short, they make understanding and acting on data easier.
According to a recent Gartner Marketing Organizational Design and Strategy survey, nearly two-thirds of marketers say marketing, rather than IT, leads technology purchase decisions.
As marketers access on-demand campaign and channel performance data on a single platform, the benefits of employing a marketing dashboard solution that combines BI with data analytics become clear: » Reduced reliance on IT. According to a recent Gartner Marketing Organizational Design and Strategy survey, nearly two-thirds of marketers say marketing, rather than IT, leads technology purchase decisions. As a result, dashboards have emerged as a tool by marketers for marketers, requiring a lower investment, fewer hands on deck, and deployment without a database architect. » Simplicity and speed. Modern marketers expect business tools that are easy to use and understand. Dashboards are intuitive and give visual structure to marketing performance. In addition, they provide deeper insights faster, including marketing-specific views such as funnel visualizations and path analysis. » Data integration and automation. While marketers may review data sources on a regular basis, data integration provides an automated method to organize and normalize marketing data. This allows marketers to unify all sources and channels into one view and provide the KPIs that are most relevant for marketing teams. » Real-time insights. Some dashboard solutions require manual login by the marketer to source information and insights. Others allow the User to set thresholds and alerts on critical KPIs. If a campaign isn’t performing as expected, the dashboard can proactively notify Users, so they can take corrective action. This allows marketers to stay in tune with items in progress, as well as learn in real time what may not be working. Ultimately, this can save a company the time and money spent on ineffective marketing tactics. Marketers’ need for speed and autonomy is at odds with legacy data storage and reporting approaches, which are slow, inflexible, and often, expensive. Marketing dashboards meet the needs of the modern, data-driven marketer, combining business intelligence and data analytics into one platform to allow marketers to work with their data and uncover useful insights for their business.
