The big-name business intelligence (BI) tools like are popular today for good reason.
Analytics platforms like Tableau and Microsoft Power BI provide robust business data. They enable non-tech savvy and technical users to create reports with ease. And this BI reporting gives marketing actionable insights to use across their programs.
But many organizations are eliminating these BI tools from their stacks entirely (or, at the very least, reducing their reliance on them). Now, they’re turning to the customer data platform (CDP) as their main data reporting tool.
And, by doing so, they’re transforming their businesses and marketing strategies.
Business intelligence reporting and data analysis: A must for marketing today
Best-in-class BI tools have long provided companies of all kinds with the ability to break down big data and access real-time data analytics required to make big business decisions:
Product development: Leverage BI in conjunction with competitive intelligence about the market to create or refine products and services and adjust go-to-market strategies.
Sales and account executives: More easily analyze prospect and customer data, and use that data to modify nurture, upsell, and cross-sell messaging for leads and buyers.
Executive teams: View data associated with client invoices, team budgets, and revenue trajectories as well as metrics related to their customer retention strategies.
Marketing: Consolidate first-party data from across their martech ecosystem to improve their lifecycle orchestration, integrated campaigns, and, ultimately, conversions.
Conventional business intelligence reporting tools in and of itself can certainly aid the first three departments above. But marketing teams — particularly at enterprises — need more than a system that solely syncs first-party data into one digital location.
Rather, they need a solution that helps them analyze, organize, and liberate that data.
This begs the question, though: What specific technology has the requisite ‘business intelligence architecture’ that unifies data sources and offers a single customer view?
The answer: A CDP.
What makes the CDP a viable business intelligence reporting solution
Put plainly, self-service BI solutions offer in-depth (and worthwhile) data visualizations and analysis features but fail to provide any means for marketing to liberate that data.
But without the right personnel to operate this business intelligence reporting tool and own data governance for the company at-large, it can become more detrimental than helpful.
Why? Because technology users often have to allocate lots of time and resources to sort through data in these tools and, eventually, derive useful insights from the data.
However, these BI tools can lead to worthwhile insights and inform marketing decision-making by syncing into a more sophisticated and advanced business intelligence system that facilitates efficient activation — like a customer data platform.
Especially a pure-play CDP like BlueConic, which marketers and other growth-focused teams can use for ad hoc reporting without the need for IT and data science to hold their hands.
Leveraging a CDP’s analytics and business intelligence reporting capabilities
As Capterra Senior Director of Business Analytics and Operations Christopher Hogan aptly explained to CMSWire, CDPs “do the dirty work” for technology users.
Take BlueConic’s pure-play customer data platform, for example. Our CDP offers the essential mix of both business intelligence visibility and data science capabilities.
There’s certainly a sizable barrier separating data science and business intelligence. But both aid brands’ marketing programs significantly. Just through different means:
Business intelligence entails data from the past that is much more marketer- and executive-friendly, as it incorporates static info on prior outcomes and efforts undertaken by various departments and is presented in clean, easy-to-understand dashboards.
Data science involves cleaning past customer data for future marketing use cases: from multi-dimensional segmentation construction to predictive analytics and machine learning models that forecast customer churn propensity and customer lifetime value.
Obviously, BI systems handle its namesake pretty well. But it’s only the CDP that offers both of these data analysis capabilities — which, when combined, can elevate their strategies.
For instance, our CDP enables you to dynamically segment and analyze prospects and customers. From this data analysis, you can then identify high-value audiences and deploy the aforementioned out-of-the-box predictive models with great ease.
Don’t want (or need) to deploy predictive machine learning models like these? You can instead utilize our CDP’s rich customer insights feature (called the Profile Recognition dashboard) to routinely evaluate these segments and augment your marketing.
Marketing activation makes the CDP the premier BI tool for large-scale brands
The CDP isn’t alone in replicating the functionality of business intelligence software.
Other popular business technologies have also tried to infuse the core capabilities offered by the premier business intelligence solutions in their systems as well.
But all these tech tools have come up short when compared to a pure-play CDP.
For instance, data marts and data warehouses (see: legacy database martech) provide repositories of data from separate sources for various business users and use cases. In the case of marketing, this means siloed customer data is merged for analysis.
But, as with traditional BI software, there are notable downsides to these solutions.
Specifically, both are historically IT-run solutions that require considerable attention and resources to maintain. Moreover, neither technologies are activation systems like the CDP.
The CDP offers the best of both worlds, regarding business intelligence:
Unification of relevant customer data in a dedicated system that makes strategic decision-making simpler and more streamlined for CMOs and on-the-ground marketers
Activation of customer data in personalized and individualized marketing that lead to bespoke customer experiences for buyers and prospects at every single lifecycle stage
“When the data is presented to decision-makers in such a visually appealing and useful way, they are enabled to chase and explore data-driven opportunities more confidently,” business intelligence analyst Narendra Mulani noted for Harvard Business Review.
And you won’t find a data-driven solution that supplies a more precise, up-to-date view of your prospects and customers that also happens to give you the confidence to deliver the highest-quality marketing messaging and CX than an advanced BI solution like the CDP.
Learn how you can enhance your business intelligence reporting with our pure-play customer data platform. Request your demo with the BlueConic team today.