Traditionally, the success of marketing has been measured by the quantity of desired outputs (leads or customers, for example) rather than quality, as there hasn’t been a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing in real-time. Without hard numbers to review, CEO’s and COO’s would gravitate toward evaluating financial outcomes alone, while failing to see the value of the marketing department.
Today, marketing teams are overwhelmed with data that track every interaction and opportunity. But unfortunately, data – as valuable as it is – is not alone the answer. Valuable data is often siloed across various sources and thus is very difficult to analyze collectively in a way that produces actionable next steps. Read on to learn how Microsoft’s new Power BI can make the headache of reporting into a dashboard that pulls this data together and makes communicating data-driven insights a breeze.
Power to Evaluate
As a marketer, you need to know what is working and what is not working as soon as possible. So, tobest allocate your resources towards the efforts that are making a difference, you need to be able to evaluate the results of all your campaigns in one consolidated dashboard. With Power BI, you can do just that.
Power BI will help you look at trends and drill down to get to the root cause of any issue that may arise. For example, if you are tracking website visits and have integrated Google Analytics into your dashboard, you’ll not only be able to see if your website visits dip, you’ll be able to dig deeper by date to find out what might have caused the sudden decline.
Power to Communicate in Real Time
If you’re a marketer, you know how much you need to keep up with on a day-to-day basis. With Power BI, you can customize your dashboard so you can get updates on-the-go and alerts daily. Typically this information is something you have to dig for, but with Power BI it will be displayed visually with KPI or graphical representation that you can easily add your notes to and send off to your team.
For instance, if you’re promoting a webinar and your dashboard includes a connection to Webex registrations, you can get updates on our registration results as the go.
Power to be Proactive
Reporting has historically been done at the end of the month, period or quarter. But what kind of impact can that reporting have, since the results can only be applied to the next campaign and don’t impact the current efforts?
However, let’s say you have Power BI. Using our last example, if you’re promoting a webinar and your registrations are not meeting expectations, you take action immediately to boost those numbers, instead of having to wait until the next webinar to correct your mistakes. In this case, you would be able to manipulate your content and update your efforts.
Can Power BI Work for You?
Here’s the good news: Anyone that would consider themselves reasonably proficient at Excel can maintain these dashboards. Power BI is flexible and allows you to connect easily new data sources to track the latest metric or data source. More importantly, you don’t need to involve your IT department or have a degree in computer science to make changes — this is a tool you can make changes to as you need.
Pre-built connectors help to integrate with sales to get a better picture of what is happening in your business. The bottom line is that you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing when you are not operating in the dark.
Final Thought
Marketing departments may have struggled to show the value of their marketing efforts in the past because data on effectiveness was difficult to track and to produce. With Power BI, you can help raise the visibility of marketing within your organization. The tool allows you to create and easily manipulate your data sources and speak in a language that management teams understand.
In short, a Power BI dashboard can help you to get better clarity, better visibility, and better results.
Ready to join disparate data, visualize it, and glean transformational insight? Click here and we’ll visualize your data for free.
