What Are the Advantages of Self-Service Marketing BI?

In recent years, business intelligence technology has become a staple in many industries and business functions, and marketing is no exception. BI enables companies to analyze and interpret marketing data gathered from corporate software and public sources, including their websites, social media accounts, or CRM systems, to craft more efficient marketing strategies and customer engagement campaigns.

To maximize the advantages of BI for marketing, most future-oriented companies are now implementing self-service BI tools. These solutions help businesses accelerate data democratization and shift to data-driven marketing by making data analysis accessible to all, even non-tech-savvy employees.

This article covers the concept of self-service business intelligence, highlights its most prominent advantages, and provides recommendations on choosing the right self-service BI tool.

What is self-service BI for marketing

Self-service marketing BI allows non-technical users without data science skills, such as statistical analysis or data mining, to access marketing data analytics. Companies can realize this concept by adopting custom or platform-based self-service marketing BI solutions. These tools provide no-code functionalities for data sorting, filtering, analysis, and visualization, thus enabling marketing reps to analyze data and generate insights without turning to a company’s IT or BI team.

What are the advantages of self-service marketing BI?

Implementation of self-service marketing BI and concurrent democratization of marketing data can improve the following aspects:

Streamlined data analysis and decision-making

If a company uses traditional BI tools, a marketer must submit a request to the company’s IT or BI team to analyze marketing data or generate a data report. A marketer then may have to wait days or even weeks for specialists to prepare the necessary deliverables and only then put them to work. This can significantly reduce a marketer’s decision-making speed, which can result in missed leads and business opportunities for a company.

A company can streamline marketers’ decision-making by switching to self-service marketing BI tools. By using a robust self-service BI solution, employees can process marketing data faster (even in real-time) to anticipate market trends or customer behavior more efficiently. This can enhance the quality and speed of decision-making and increase marketing efficiency.

Reduced IT and BI costs

Once a marketer initiates data analysis, BI or IT specialists need to approve his or her request and prepare the required data. This process can involve many time-consuming tasks, such as extracting data from different software systems, cleaning and transforming it, and uploading it into a data lake or any other storage. Then, they must generate and deliver the requested analytical results, which may also require data visualization.

As mentioned earlier, this entire process can take days or even weeks and require dozens of hours of data experts’ work. By implementing self-service marketing BI, a company can free its BI and IT teams from this burden and help reallocate their energy and resources to other functions, which can bring significant cost savings to a business in the long run.

Fostered data-driven culture

The use of self-service marketing BI teaches marketers to work with data directly, i.e. process it, build analytical reports, visualize their findings, and execute other analysis tasks. Therefore, self-service marketing BI helps increase data literacy among non-technical specialists and spread a data-driven culture within a company. This, in turn, can help a business become more technologically flexible and accelerate innovation.

How to choose the right self-service marketing BI tool?

There are dozens of self-service BI solutions on the market provided by AWS, Google, Salesforce, and many other lesser-known vendors. Each of these solutions may differ in its functionality and technical characteristics. To help a company make the right choice, we recommend looking for the following characteristics in the self-service BI software:

Intuitive and easy-to-use

Since marketers are not technical users, companies should prioritize the usability and convenience of a self-service BI tool. To ensure high user adoption among marketing reps, companies should choose software with responsive, concise, and intuitive interfaces that can be navigated and operated with ease.

Easy to integrate

Since the accuracy of marketing analytics insights depends on the volume of analyzed data, self-service marketing BI tools need to easily integrate with other digital systems. Ideally, connecting new data sources should be easy enough for marketers to do it independently without turning to tech experts’ help.

Collaborative

Marketers routinely exchange analysis results with each other to ask for advice from more experienced peers or share insights with colleagues. Therefore, a robust self-service marketing BI solution should include collaborative functionalities like document sharing, live comments, or collaborative search.

Scalable

As a business evolves, its marketing team and the volumes of data they process can grow significantly. If a self-service marketing BI tool cannot handle the increased workload, the team can face performance issues, which in turn may disrupt a company’s marketing operations. To prevent this, companies should choose scalable BI solutions.

Secure

Self-service marketing BI tools can process large amounts of sensitive customer data, including contacts, demographics, and preferences. To guarantee the safety of this data, companies should choose only those self-service BI solutions providing robust security mechanisms, such as data encryption, data masking, and access controls.

Final thoughts

Business intelligence is essential for modern marketing. It allows businesses to gather and unify diverse business data and then analyze and interpret it to make intelligent marketing decisions on both strategic and tactical levels. Self-service marketing BI is an evolution of traditional BI. Self-service marketing BI tools enable all employees, even those without technical backgrounds, to perform marketing data analytics independently, thus improving decision-making.

Nonetheless, selecting the proper BI tool can be challenging, especially for companies that haven’t yet worked with self-service BI. Business intelligence experts can help your company select the proper self-service marketing BI tool on the market and implement it smoothly or even build such a solution from scratch to cover your unique marketing needs.