Business intelligence, or BI, has established itself as a fundamental must in all digital marketing and sales strategies. The multiple challenges faced by CMOs, CCOs, to increase sales, awareness and customer loyalty in a digitized market governed by data solutions, have made tools like Power BI have become indispensable among marketing and sales departments to properly manage information and brand insights to analyze this information accurately.
Currently, companies seek to make decisions based on data and optimize their marketing and sales efforts, therefore, Power BI has become the main wildcard for data analysis for this purpose, let's see how:
What is Power BI and what is it for?
Power BI is a data analysis and visualization tool from Microsoft that provides users with a wide range of visualization options, such as graphs, charts, tables, maps and interactive diagrams to represent data much more effectively.
One of the particularities of this tool is the ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources (Excel, XML, JSON, SharePoint; among others), databases (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Google Bigquery, etc.), Azure services, local files, web applications, etc. (SQL, Excel, Dynamics 365, Spark, Surveymonkey, etc.) allowing users to share their reports and dashboards with other people in the organization securely through the cloud.
What challenges do marketing and sales managers face?
Marketing and sales managers face constant challenges in the quest to improve the effectiveness of their strategies, such as:
- Better understand the audience and their preferences to create effective campaigns.
- Deliver personalized and relevant experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Measure return on investment (ROI) and evaluate the performance of strategies and channels used to optimize resources and budget.
- Detect emerging opportunities and market trends to stay competitive and up-to-date in a constantly evolving environment.
- Facilitate collaboration and communication between marketing and sales teams to achieve common goals.
How to use Power BI in a marketing and sales department?
Some of the main uses that marketing or sales departments can take advantage of Power BI are as follows:
- Define key objectives and metrics aligned with the company's global strategy and to understand customer needs.
- Identify and collect relevant data from various sources such as social media, websites, customer analytics tools, CRM and ERP systems.
- Centralize and organize data using appropriate BI tools and software. In this way, we will have quick and easy access to the information needed at the right time.
- Analyze data effectively through descriptive analysis to understand past performance, analysis to predict future trends and get recommendations on what to do next.
- Customize and segment marketing and sales strategy, making continuous adjustments to improve results based on analytics and market needs.
- Promote an organizational culture and use data in decision making, fostering collaboration and continuous learning among the different teams of the companies.
Sales and marketing reporting with Power BI
One of the main features that Power BI offers is the ability to create customized reports and interactive dashboards. CMOs or CCOs will be able to take advantage of this functionality to have reports that include metrics such as:
- Website traffic
- Measurement in mailing campaigns.
- Brand insights.
- Social media reporting.
- Conversions
- Cost per user acquisition
- Opportunities generated
- Sales achieved by location and season
- Interests of your customer segments
- Average time to close sales
- Analyze feedback and results of customer surveys.
How much does Power BI cost - expense or investment?
One of the most recurring questions when working with Power BI is the cost of this solution for organizations. However, the democratization of this tool by data analysts and its rapid adoption in the market in recent years, have led it to be positioned as the best BI tool by the Gartner quadrant for its multiple benefits, becoming more of an investment than an expense per se.
Of course, depending on the needs and budget of each organization, there are three licensing options: Power BI Free, Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium.
- Power BI Free: This license will allow the user to create complete reports interactively. No credit card is required.
- Power BI Pro: With this license, the user can publish, share and organize Power BI reports and access to subscriptions in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 (9,40€ user/month).
- Power BI Premium: It is designed for enterprise use, includes all the features of Power BI Pro, allowing access to larger sizes and models and has more recurring updates (18,70€ user/month).
Connecting Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
By connecting and unifying Power BI with Customer Insights data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, users can obtain a complete and holistic view of their customers in real time, allowing them to measure transactional and demographic information, create segments by specific profiles and use Copilot to filter the information much more accurately. In this way, CMOs or CCOs will be able to design much more effective and defined strategies, facilitate collaboration with other work teams and identify better cross-selling opportunities.
By using Power BI, companies can gain a complete view of the performance of their marketing and sales strategies, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and improve their bottom line. In addition, integration with other Microsoft tools and the ability to adapt to different needs and budgets make Power BI an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.
Would you like more information about this or other BI solutions? Don't hesitate to contact us, our Data team will be happy to help you!