Automating Data Wrangling to Simplify Marketing for Marketers
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.
(Federico Garcia Lorca)
The fact that marketing has gone digital is as old as stale bread. There is no doubt that going digital has simplified and maximized the reach of marketers. Customers don’t shy away from sharing their details if they are convinced about the value proposition in doing so. Free trials, exclusive previews, latest news, hottest items and so on are the sort of things that piques their curiosity. If done right, digital marketing opens the floodgates for quality leads.
There’s also flipside to all that is good about the digital medium, there’s just too much data marketers must deal with.
Logging into your CRM systems allows you to manage relationships and spot opportunities.
Web Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Kissmetrics will tell you a bunch of things like sources of your traffic, most visited pages, campaign overview and everything else you need to check & optimize the overall health of your online property.
You can also choose from a bunch of sales analytics tools like Tableau and InsightSquared to get under the skin of your sales performance.
Social analytics tools will tell give insights into your social media performance and help you better engage with customers.
Now, if you as a marketer wish to get a holistic picture of how well the show is running, you must enlist the help of IT to assemble data from all these silos. Assuming you have data scientists at your disposal, they will start wrangling (cleaning and sorting) with the assembled data.
Let’s say you want to know everything that happened over the last 30 days, your scientists will gather data for that period from each platform and ensure that piece of information is uniform and error free.
This is something your data science team must to do every time you ask them for a piece of insight like –
- Can I get an indication for ROI on everything we have spent money on? Which cluster gives us the best long term profitability?
- How much was the payoff from our last influencer outreach? Can I get a break of all the spikes and dips in our sales figures?
- Who are the people behind them?
Sometimes the data wrangling efforts of your data scientists will be helpful, but as your questions start becoming intuitively complex, answers will be hard to come by.
Manual data wrangling is a painstaking process for data scientists, and a slow one at that. Unfortunately, their pain becomes your pain when you can’t get all the answers and when you do get them it is often too late for any action. All the different tools and platforms at your disposal hold bits of very powerful data that need to be weaved into a meaningful story.
An effective way of addressing data wrangling issues is by automating the process and keeping human intervention at a minimum. Data wrangling fits the bill for letting machine intelligence take over the mundane and laborious job of going through millions of rows, hundreds of columns and random strings of textual data.
At DataScout we let automation sort out your data wrangling demons. DataScout sits on top of a big data platform that is packed with intelligent algorithms and machine learning capabilities. It wrangles data for you so your dependency on IT is minimum and your data scientists can exercise their skills more often (Did you know that data wrangling inhibits data scientists to give their best only 20% of the time).
DataScout is an ideal self-service BI tool that breaks through analytics silos and lives up to the definition. As a business user, you will never have to bother calling IT or indulge in DIY coding hell. No question is too crazy or difficult that simple point and click gestures cannot solve. Whether you want an overview or hold your sales reps accountable, our easy to use dashboards will give you the insights you need. Since DataScout delivers real-time insights, your forecasts and what-if queries will always be accurate.