According to a study from HubSpot, a vast majority of marketers think that marketing, as a function, has undergone more explosive changes in the last three years than it went through in the past fifty. AI advancement, the rise of influencers, growth of new channels such as podcasts and short-form video, and deeper digital footprint of the user-all have contributed to arriving at new norms in the way organizations reach out to consumers. The average company uses from 3 to 12 different channels for its marketing outreach program.
All this is resulting in more versatility, but it also comes with data management complexity. Data is no longer simple text or even visual and audio; with the advent of media like the Metaverse, it 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 to make data-driven marketing strategies. This is where data visualization tools such as Power BI and Tableau come in. They make a difference and add value to marketers. What is a Data Visualization tool? And What does it do?
Data Visualization tools change raw data into clear, interactive visuals and dashboards that show insights to the marketer. The most commonly used Data visualization tools are by Power BI of Microsoft and Tableau by Salesforce. Their biggest advantage is that they have ready-made connectors which will link up with other commonly used marketing tools, like CRMs, Google AdSense, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Analytics, and so forth.
How Sales and Marketing teams can 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 teams can use data visualization to grow their revenues in a predictable manner.
These tools will not only help them recognize sales risks but also provide visibility into upsell and cross-sell opportunities by offering insights from pattern recognition of existing data. It also helps predict future sales by comparing performance with a comparable previous period. Other ways in which a sales team can make use of these tools include creating a Sales performance dashboard that highlights: 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 enables marketers and business executives to zero in on what’s happening with the aspects of their marketing strategy that matter most, where differences need to be made if things start going astray, and how to identify opportunities for new initiatives that spur even greater successes. Some sample KPI dashboards showing 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: Whenever any large consumer brand, say Starbucks, launches a new loyalty program, they usually reach out to the same set of consumers through different channels.
That campaign is going on across those channels; now it can be done using the same user interface. Now in such scenarios, the most common challenge faced by any marketer is the integration of data coming from different isolated tools. Thanks to the ready availability of connectors with Tableau and Power BI, these data visualization tools plug in with most commonly used marketing channels like Website, Email, and Social media. Once pulled in, this tool lets the marketer create visual storyboards and interactive charts that give a bird’s-eye view of cross-channel campaign performance. Marketer can then gauge which is the best channel choice(s). Organic Vs Paid Ads results measurement: Companies like Airbnb, MakeMyTrip, Unacademy etc., depend a lot on website traffic for leads.
They normally use a mix of powers of SEO and Paid Ads (SEM, PPC etc.) to drive traffic onto their website. In such cases, marketers may want to measure the effectiveness of organic and paid content side by side. Marketers can easily integrate Google Analytics and Google AdWords, or import relevant data-such as keyword research, cost-per-click, and conversion rates-into their Power BI or Tableau application and hence monitor the effectiveness of Organic Vs Paid results in real time, thus improving ROI in social media. Data Visualization: the tools are very powerful and effective for visualizing simple raw data into powerful visual dashboards and charts that tell stories.
Tableau/Power BI will let marketers tell a story that could start with a dashboard showing a cost apportioned to various campaigns and channels; with just one click of the button, it then transitions into another dashboard showing the performance of those campaigns, ending with a final dashboard of how those campaigns have translated in terms of sales or revenue to the company. These dashboards can be further broken down, diced, and analyzed for deeper insights. This reduces the learning curve for organizations, apart from coming up with effective marketing strategies. Recent Trends in Power BI:
That being said, while it is great to create such powerful visual dashboards and charts, digesting all this visual information in a unidirectional visual pipeline may become cumbersome and daunting. But what if you could chat and converse with your data directly?
Here’s where Microsoft’s Copilot comes in. Copilot pairs the power of large language models, or LLMs, with data. Marketers can simply ask a question about the report content in their Power BI app or summarize key insights on it in seconds with Copilot.
Able to converse with the data and dashboards-raises the game for marketers from existing processes that do require interpretation through one’s own cognitive efforts.
In fact, even these Copilot-generated insights and reports can be used for documentation and reporting purposes. Let Copilot make use of measures and columns from the semantic model to help a marketer find new insights from data. When you ask questions about your reports and datasets, Copilot first checks if the answer is represented in the report visuals. If the existing visuals cannot answer your question, Copilot will generate a new visual for you. Summary
As the consumers are changing, so data capturing and analyzing technology should change also in rapid motion. Besides the above-mentioned tools above, in some years, we can see three-dimensional holographic dashboards that will solve the AR/VR Metaverse contexts emerging.
Organizations should equip themselves by continuously training their manpower on short-term skill programs, hiring interns who can fast-forward the implementation of these, and co-creating the syllabus with universities that would make the students job-ready.
Students will also be working hands-on through projects, certifications, and keeping updated about all the latest features and best practices in data visualization and business intelligence. Fortunately, these require only a basic knowledge of analysis of data, familiarity with Excel, and some fair understanding of databases and SQL. Technology by itself cannot replace good marketing, but technology tools in the hands of marketers can be disruptive and hugely beneficial for organizations.
