Due to evolving consumer behavior, technological advancements, and the constant influx of data, marketing analytics has become crucially important in business. But, without accurate data interpretation, your business is at risk of making costly mistakes.
Enter the game-changer: Microsoft Power BI. Developed to connect businesses to data sources. Power BI transforms raw data into actionable insights and visually appealing reports, giving marketers a robust platform for data-driven decision-making.
Various independent studies have shown that data-driven companies are better able to adapt to change and anticipate future trends. At Fusion we have helped clients in the marketing sector hone in on their numbers and see positive results in revenue growth.
Activate Power BI for valuable marketing insights
By leveraging its features, marketers can optimize campaigns, gain valuable insights, and propel business growth. To benefit from intelligent marketing insights using Power BI, it is essential to ensure that your data is well-prepared and properly integrated.
Follow these steps to leverage Power BI effectively:
1. Data preparation and integration
Before delving into marketing analytics with Power BI, a solid foundation is crucial. It is important to get the following right:
- Identify your key data sources. Consider pulling all relevant marketing information from sources relevant to your business. Whether it be Google Analytics, social media, or other advertising platforms; having all your data integrated with Power BI will make for a holistic view of the campaigns that work for your clients.
- Ensure data integrity. To get an accurate picture, you need to have data consistency and accuracy. This can be achieved by getting your accountant to check that the integration is done with standardized formats. Avoiding duplicates and missing values.
- Data modeling. When connecting Power BI to data sources, create a data model that aligns with your marketing goals. Define key data relationships, creating calculated measures to optimize data for efficient analysis.
2. Visualizing your marketing data
With prepared and integrated data, visualization becomes possible and is key to giving all team members insight into what works and what doesn’t. When it comes to visualization, these are some of the key considerations:
- Get your visualization preferences right. Choose appropriate visualizations, from bar charts to maps, catering to the type of data being represented.
- Carefully consider the relevant metrics. Identify the key metrics and KPIs relevant to your marketing goals that you need to track consistently.
- Implement further data isolation abilities. Interactive dashboards and features like filters and slicers within NetSuite, allow users to drill down into specific dimensions or filter data based on changing criteria.
3. Enjoy advanced analytics and insights
Power BI elevates marketing analytics with advanced capabilities such as the following:
- Predictive analytics. Forecast future outcomes using predictive analytics algorithms, optimizing marketing strategies based on insights.
- Segmentation and targeting. Effectively segment customer bases using Power BI’s machine learning algorithms and tailoring campaigns that allow you to isolate based on demographic, behavioral, or transactional attributes.
- Marketing attribution. Measure the impact of marketing activities across channels, attributing conversions and analyzing campaign effectiveness. With Power BI, you can also extract insights from unstructured text data like social media comments and customer reviews.
Commonly tracked marketing data
Not sure where to start when it comes to marketing metrics to track for insights into your advertising efforts? These are some of the commonly assessed marketing data that businesses would benefit from understanding, and how Power BI can enable you to do so.
- Conversion rate. Power BI aids in tracking and analyzing conversion rates across different channels, helping businesses understand the effectiveness of their advertising efforts.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Power BI facilitates the calculation and visualization of CAC, enabling businesses to assess the cost-effectiveness of acquiring new customers.
- Return on Investment (ROI). By integrating data sources, Power BI allows businesses to measure the ROI of various marketing campaigns and channels, which will aid in strategic decision-making.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). With Power BI you can analyze customer data to determine CLV. This will give your business insights into understanding the long-term value of your customer relationships.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by looking at the CTR. Power BI enables the tracking and visualization of CTR so that you can know how engaging your target audience finds your marketing campaigns.
- Social Media Engagement. Power BI’s capabilities extend to social media platforms, allowing businesses to measure engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments to evaluate their social media impact. The same goes for email campaigns. Businesses can see the effectiveness of their email marketing efforts by seeing at a glance on their visual dashboard, what their newsletter engagements were like.
- Brand awareness metrics. Power BI can assist in tracking brand awareness metrics, such as impressions and reach, across various marketing channels.
Partnering with the experts
While gaining access to key marketing metrics will ensure less wastage for marketing teams, getting the set-up right is key. Faulty integrations will give you a skewed view of your data which is counter productive in terms of what your business is trying to achieve. If you’re using the software to track overall financial performance and link to your accounting software then you may also be at risk of getting into hot for compliance.
Involving a CPA in Power BI implementation ensures not only the technical accuracy of the software integration but also aligns the tool with the unique financial requirements and compliance standards of the business. Power BI offers a wide array of features. CPAs can guide businesses to use these features effectively to meet financial and accounting needs. At Fusion CPA, our Microsoft Power BI CPAs can help implement the software to give you the insights you require. We can show you how to integrate Power BI and NetSuite or QuickBooks and help set your business up to improve your chances of achieving financial success.
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This blog article is not intended to be the rendering of legal, accounting, tax advice, or other professional services. Articles are based on current or proposed tax rules at the time they are written and older posts are not updated for tax rule changes. We expressly disclaim all liability in regard to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this blog as well as the use or interpretation of this information. Information provided on this website is not all-inclusive and such information should not be relied upon as being all-inclusive.
