Marketing just got more ‘powered’ by Power BI and Tableau!

Authored by Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy, Professor, Great Lakes Institute of Management,                                     

Ashish Bharadwaj, Corporate Development Manager, Growth and Strategy, Archimedis Digital 

Rishi Victor, Student(Data science), University of Washington , Seattle

According to a survey by HubSpot, more than 75% marketers feel that marketing as a function has witnessed explosive changes in the last 3 years than it did in the last fifty. Advancement in AI, rise of influencers, growth of new channels (such as podcasts and short form video), deeper digital footprint of the user-have all contributed to arriving at ‘new norms’ in the way organisations reach out to consumers. An average company uses anywhere from 3 to 12 different channels for their marketing outreach programs.

While all this is resulting in more versatility, it also brings along with it data management complexity. Data no longer is simply text, or even visual or audio; with the advent of medium like the Metaverse, data has morphed into sensory, haptics and even neural. Today, marketers struggle with disconnected data from multiple sources, and look for ways to derive meaningful and actionable insights in order to make data-driven marketing strategies. This is where Data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau can make a difference and add value to marketers. 

What is a Data Visualization tool? And What does it do?

A Data Visualization tool transforms raw data into clear, interactive visuals and dashboards, that unlock insights for the marketer. Power BI by Microsoft and Tableau by Salesforce are the most commonly used Data visualization tools. The biggest advantage of using these tools is that they come with ready-made connectors that can link up with other commonly used marketing tools like CRMs, Google AdSense, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Analytics and so on. 

How can Sales and Marketing teams leverage Power BI and Tableau:

An enormous amount of time is spent by sales and marketing professionals in simply collecting data and putting them together in an analyzable form. The Data visualization tools cut this time, thus making the organisations more efficient. Depending on the input data shared, several outcomes can be strived for, using these tools. 

• Sales Forecasting: Sales team can use data visualization tools to grow their revenues in a predictable manner. These tools not only help identify sales risks, but also provides visibility into upselling and cross-selling opportunities through pattern recognition from existing data. It also helps in predicting future sales by comparing current performance to a comparable previous period. Other ways in which a sales team can use these tools is by creating a Sales performance dashboard that includes: 
• Sales revenue across channels, products & services
• Sales Target/Quota Vs Actual Sales
• Lead conversion rate
• Retention rate
• Avg. Sales cycle

• KPI Dashboards: A KPI dashboard helps marketers and business executives identify what's going on with the elements of their marketing strategy that matter most, where to make changes if things start to go awry, and how to identify opportunities for new initiatives that can spur even greater success. Some examples of KPI dashboards that show marketing effectiveness are: 
• Keyword performance
• Average time on page
• Conversion rate
• Average lead score
• Website traffic lead ratio

• 360° view of Cross-Channel Campaign performance: When a large consumer brand like Starbucks rolls out a new loyalty program, they typically target the same set of consumers from multiple channels. How the campaign performs across the channels can now be done using a single user interface. In such scenarios, the most commonly faced challenge is the integration of data from various isolated tools. Thanks to Tableau and Power BI, these data visualization tools come with ready-made connectors that can easily plugin with the most commonly used marketing channels such as Website, Email, Social media etc. Once the data is pulled in, the tool allows a marketer to create visual story boards, and interactive charts that gives a bird’s eye view on cross-channel campaign performance.  The marketer can then analyse which is the most optimal channel choice(s).

• Measure Organic Vs Paid Ads results: Companies like Airbnb, MakeMyTrip, Unacademy etc., rely on a lot of website traffic for leads. They typically combine the power of SEO and Paid Ads (SEM, PPC etc.) to drive traffic to their website. In such cases, marketers may want to assess the effectiveness of their organic and paid content by comparing them side-by-side. Marketers can easily integrate Google Analytics and Google AdWords or simply import relevant data, such as keyword research, cost-per-click (CPC), and conversion rates into to their Power BI or Tableau application and monitor the effectiveness of Organic Vs Paid results in real-time, thus improving ROI in social media.

• Visual Storytelling: Data Visualization tools are very effective in transforming simple raw data into powerful visual dashboards and charts that enable story telling. Marketers can use Tableau/Power BI to narrate a story that starts with a dashboard highlighting the cost allocated to different campaigns and channels, and with a click of a button, can transition to a dashboard that shows the performance of the campaigns, and finally present a dashboard that shows how these campaigns have translated to sales or revenue for the company. These dashboards can be further broken down, diced and analyzed for deeper insights.  This reduces the learning curve for organisations, in addition to coming up with effective marketing strategies.

Recent trends in Power BI:

While creating powerful visual dashboards and charts is desirable, digesting all this visual information in a unidirectional visual pipeline can be complex and daunting. But, what if you can chat and converse with your data directly? 

Enter Copilot by Microsoft. Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with data. Marketers can use Copilot in their Power BI app to ask a question about report content or summarize key insights in seconds. 

The ability to chat with data and dashboards is a level up in the marketing game, from the existing process of having to interpret using one’s own cognitive efforts. Further, these Copilot generated insights and reports can even be used for documentation and reporting. Copilot can utilize the measures and columns from the semantic model to assist a marketer in discovering new insights from data. When you pose queries about your reports and datasets, Copilot first examines whether the answer is represented in the report visuals. If the current visuals cannot address your question, Copilot will create a new visual representation for you.

Conclusion

As consumers evolve, the data capturing and analyzing technology needs to evolve too, at a rapid pace. In addition to the above tools , we may soon witness three dimensional, holographic dashboards, that will address the AR/VR Metaverse contexts that are emerging. 

Organisations need to equip themselves by constantly training their workforce through short term skill programs, hiring interns who can fast forward implementation of these, and co-creating syllabi with Universities, that will make the students job ready. Students can also gain hands-on experience through projects, certifications, and by staying updated with the latest features and best practices in data visualization and business intelligence. Fortunately, the prerequisites needed for these are basic knowledge of data analysis, familiarity with Excel, and an understanding of databases and SQL only.

Technology by itself cannot replace good marketing, but technology tools in the hands of marketers can be disruptive and hugely beneficial for organisations.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and Adgully.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.