As everyone knows, we’re firmly ensconced in the “Age of Data”. More marketing data is being generated and captured than ever before. Fortunately, the array of business intelligence (BI) tools that can help marketers analyze and interpret all this data is ever increasing as well. But how do you pick the right solution?
This is a complicated question, but one that every organization will eventually have to work through. To help get you thinking in the right direction, I’ve compiled a list of considerations that can put you on the path toward choosing the tool that best fits your business needs. Having walked dozens of clients through this process, I’ve figured out that there are some key questions to consider and some pitfalls you will want to avoid.
The first question you should seek to answer is: Do I even need a BI solution?
If you don’t have marketing automation software, or you’re getting by with Excel reports, and are happy with the status quo, then you don’t necessarily need a BI tool… at least not yet.
If you do have a marketing automation platform, they typically come with rudimentary, pre-packaged analytics solutions. The good news is that these solutions integrate nicely with your existing marketing software and are often included in the cost of the platform. The downside is that they are often clunky to use, not very intuitive, and the ability to integrate multiple data sources is typically nonexistent.
To move organizations past Excel and the limited tools that are baked into your marketing automation platform or CRM, a slew of BI tool providers have stepped in to fill the void: Tableau, Qlik, Domo, GoodData, Oracle BI, Geckoboard, SAS, and MicroStrategy (to name a few). There are pros and cons to each of these specific tools that are beyond the scope of this post, but let’s address some key considerations that you need to pay attention to before selecting any of them.
Assuming you’ve decided you need a BI solution, the next question you should ask is: What do you want your solution to do?
What business questions do you want it to be able to answer? Do you need just a few basic reports, or do you require an enterprise-wide solution that can be used beyond the marketing department? These answers may change over time, but at the outset, it’s important to have an idea of the end result you’re after.
Next, who will be asking the questions of the tool, and how will they answer such questions?
In other words, who are the users, and what are their technical abilities? Any new tool will require some training or a learning curve, but this needs to be weighed against the time that is currently spent on reporting. Most of these packages require an upfront investment of time to learn and develop reports but are then automated thereafter. No more updating an Excel report and sending it out every week! That is a big selling point.
Who is the audience for the reporting?
Is it primarily marketing users, or is it executive-level folks? Both? This is important because it determines how robust your solution needs to be. It also influences how reporting will be distributed through the organization. Some tools are better at this than others.
Another important question is: How does BI fit into your overall marketing strategy?
If your marketing strategy (and resources) is dedicated to, for example, socializing your product and creating partnerships, analytics may not be a top priority at the moment. On the other hand, if your business is metric-driven and relies on tracking various measures to allocate marketing spend, a more robust BI tool is critical to successful execution of that strategy.
How much will it cost?
Budget is, of course, another key consideration. These solutions run the gamut, from very low-cost solutions for basic reporting, to full-blown enterprise-wide reporting (and pricing). Generally speaking, there is a strong positive correlation between a tool’s price and its functionality; the more features a tool has, the more you can expect to pay for it. There is typically decreasing marginal cost, too, meaning there is upfront investment, but each additional feature or report costs less than the previous one did.
What else should I consider?
A few final things to consider when making your decision are: data security, integration issues, and system change. Making sure your data is secure is obviously paramount, and nearly all BI solutions have some level of security model. However, the type of solution, whether cloud-based, on-premise, or within your virtual network, needs to be in compliance with your organization’s security policy.
The ability to integrate with multiple systems may also be important to your business. Some solutions are better than others and come with different connectors, so you need to decide which data systems you want to report on. This may include establishing a data center or warehouse in which to store your data.
Lastly, any new tool will require adoption and implementation by users in order to justify the investment. The larger the organization, the more difficult it is to expect widespread adoption, particularly at the outset. This represents an opportunity to prove to everyone the power of the BI solution you’ve selected!
One final note about getting started:
Virtually all of these solutions offer some sort of free trial period. I recommend using that time to try to reproduce one basic report that is widely used internally, and then compare the two. Need help getting started? Contact us – we can walk you through it.
Do you have any best practices you recommend or pitfalls to avoid? We’d love to hear from you.
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