This is the second post in a series about how marketers are leveraging Designer Cloud, following our first post on onboarding marketing data. In this post, we discuss how Designer Cloud is being used to prepare data for marketing analytics.
When presenting marketing findings, one of the first things asked is “How accurate is the data?” When working with data it can’t be guesswork. And you certainly can’t act upon data that hasn’t been properly cleansed to address missing or insufficient information. Increasingly, however, I’m also looking for data that draws upon multiple sources to arrive at a more nuanced conclusion—it isn’t helpful to determine marketing campaign performance on the basis of one activity, for example, but across an omni-channel view. But for a marketing team with limited data expertise, delivering these advanced insights can be a tall order.
The Advancement of Marketing Analytics
There’s social media data stemming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Clickstream, Adroll data found via Google Analytics, Lead-related data from marketing automation platforms…the list goes on. And there are different ways to slice and dice this data, whether in terms of clicks, shares, views or by filtering out certain lead categories and touchpoints to understand multi-touch attribution. As marketers, it’s your job to not only determine which data is needed for the initiative at hand, but also how to best source, cleanse, and consolidate that specific set of data into a format for consumption.
What makes that so challenging is that the spreadsheet tools marketers typically depend on weren’t built to tackle complex data. They don’t allow marketers to import JSON formats, which is inevitable when working with Twitter data, for example, let alone join that data with a CSV file downloaded from email automation platforms. Oftentimes, marketers must outsource data preparation work to a more technical team, leading to delays in analysis, or worse yet, abandoning the initiative altogether. And this can have an impact far beyond the marketing team. Since marketing data is often the first checkpoint for the health of the company—forecasting everything from current customer engagement to future sales—a lack in insights can cause a ripple effect downstream.
It’s exciting to see many Designer Cloud customers leveraging our data engineering cloud platform to tackle complex marketing data and join it with several different sources. With Designer Cloud, they’re uncovering powerful marketing insights that help steer course for the organization.
A Global Packaged Goods Company Drives Marketing with Designer Cloud
One such customer is one of the world’s leading food packaging companies, with over 100 consumer brands that span 100 countries. Their marketing organization largely rests upon data to make informed decisions about everything from accurately pricing products to the effectiveness of campaigns to creating the right branded recipes that correspond to certain products. In one such initiative, they wanted to better understand the performance of these recipes, specifically understanding what types of recipes were being shared or reposted among which demographics and during what time of the year.
What was challenging about this initiative was not only the complex type of data they needed to leverage, but also that the team needed to analyze raw text in order to classify recipes and read through their comments. Previously, they were leveraging SQL, but even that was a challenging means to tackle such complex data. With Trifacta, the total data transformation time has been cut in half, based on the ability to quickly and intuitively transform data. Now, they’re able to glean much more information from their recipe performance, and focus on recreating recipes that receive ample engagement.
Designer Cloud for Marketing Analytics
In order to perform marketing analytics, there are a lot of necessary pieces—a good team, for one, the right data, and a visual means to display findings to stakeholders. But somewhere in between all of that, Designer Cloud plays a key role of allowing teams to visually understand and format increasingly complex data. With Designer Cloud, marketers can work off of an interface that is more advanced than Excel, but that doesn’t ask them to be, in order to level up the initiatives they take on. It’s a new source of power for marketers to become even more data-driven.
To get a sense for the other features that make Designer Cloud a great fit for preparing data for marketing analytics, watch our demo focused on marketing analytics. After watching, we welcome you to try out the technology yourself—Sign up for our free 30-day trial of Designer Cloud.