How to make life easier for marketers: a new self-service tool for working with data

Hello, Habr! We started to deal with our new cloud service SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and want to share what it will be useful for. If you are interested in understanding the challenges of analytic marketing and how to start making effective data mining decisions, keep reading.

If a company has made the decision to switch to analytic marketing or has already switched, sooner or later it will need additional analytics. You will need to analyze actual sales data, calculate indicators for the conversion of marketing costs to company profits, or search for new customer attributes to obtain more accurate segmentation. For example, in B2C, customer segmentation is an important task that largely determines the effectiveness of marketing campaigns / conversion to profit of the company. There are standard customer attributes: name, address, etc. These attributes are not enough for effective segmentation. It is necessary to create new attributes based on the data, such as the purchase of goods by the client regularly or just before the holidays, how long has passed since the last purchase, the average bill, etc. Marketing analysts examine the data and, based on the data, come up with new attributes to improve the quality of segmentation.

You may also need ad-hoc data sampling for decision making or data analysis and preparation for some concept with machine learning. And maybe something else …

And this is where the problem appears. Traditionally in companies, analytical tasks are assigned to the corporate data warehouse (QCD), which plays an important role in all business processes. Support and development of QCD is in the area of ​​responsibility of the IT department. The business user (in our case, the analyst marketer) expects a very quick response to new analytics requirements, such as creating reports or data marts or even dashboards. I also want a low time to market. But IT cannot provide this level of service for several reasons:

· All new requests for changes or development must go through a cycle of approval, while a pre-formed TOR is required.

· IT resources are always limited, so for each requirement, decisions are made on the priority of implementation, depending on the business effects of a particular decision.

In short, this is another headache and a good idea may go to the basket or to the box until “better times”. Everything as usual.

What can you suggest here so as not to abandon what has been planned and not to deviate from the path? In our opinion, this is the creation of an agile self-service environment for working with QCD data, and also outside the QCD framework.

This is where it is convenient to use SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) as an agile environment for business and IT to work with data. DWC allows a business to work with a variety of data from the corporate landscape or external sources in one place. At the same time, you can save TCO due to virtual access to data stored in various systems (CRM, ERP, ecommerce, a system for sending advertisements and making calls to customers, big data storage and machine learning).

What can be done?

Build different data samples,

Combine data from various sources,

Calculate various indicators,

· Build shop windows,

· Visualize information on dashboards and reports in ad-hoc mode.

In addition, SAP supplies marketing content for DWC. It includes connectors to various sources, such as the social network LinkedIn, as well as a marketing data model, dashboards and reports.

This allows a business to start building marketing analytics from scratch. This is convenient, since you already have a starting point and you can further complement your tasks.

As a result, we get a reduction in time to market, reduce business dependence on IT, increase IT efficiency, and move to agile in the field of analytics. And we get beautiful informative reports that will definitely help your commercial directors or sales directors or marketing directors in making important decisions.

If you were interested and would like to read in more detail, click here… And if you are thinking of testing this solution yourself, use 30-Day Free Trial… And we will be happy to discuss in the comments and answer all your questions.