Let's Talk About Tableau for Marketing Analytics
In marketing analytics, Tableau is essential in connecting raw data to decisions made on behalf of your marketing strategy as raw data itself will not provide you with any useful insights. Campaign results and effective customer behavior/channel use can create rapidly actionable statistics when patterns are quickly identified for you through Tableau which allows for all of your data to be visualized in a clear and concise manner.
The exploratory analysis aspect of Tableau has been particularly beneficial to marketers who will generally ask broad questions before forming a definitive hypothesis. For example, a marketer inquired as to what customer segments would create the best revenue growth or where their campaign is underperforming. The capability of analysts to dynamically filter, drill down, and segment their data in Tableau makes it much easier to find trends that can be missed using piece-meal static reports/spreadsheets. Being able to dynamically reevaluate your data increases the likelihood of success when evaluating multidimensional data (demographics, geographic, time, etc.) as well as product attributes.
Tableau is superior in how it allows for the measurement of performance and the ability to present that information. By presenting multiple critical measures (i.e., conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, return on ad spend, etc.) in one dashboard, marketers can rely less on the fragmented report and ultimately on each other through their performance metrics.
When marketing teams work together better it creates a stronger sense of accountability and speeds up the time it takes to make critical decisions regarding budget changes or messaging changes that need to happen in a short period of time.
Another way to use Tableau is to tell a story with the data you have collected. It is important for a marketer to get non-technical stakeholders to buy in when making key decisions. Using Tableau on an analytical level allows an analyst to convert the findings into a narrative that tells the reader what has happened, what is important about it, and where they should take action. It also creates a situation where identifying trends, outliers, and comparisons will help to facilitate strategic conversations instead of debated technical issues.
Tableau's role in marketing analytics provides marketers with world-class capabilities to improve their data exploration, monitoring of performance, and ability to communicate insights. It enables a marketer to transition from using descriptive reporting to implementing a data-driven strategy, which is critical for success in competitive, rapidly evolving markets.
