BI teams and marketing, how to make it work
In this video, I discuss the relationship between BI teams and marketing. I explain why BI needs marketing, how marketing holds valuable data, and the challenges of sharing data with BI teams. I also emphasize the importance of keeping BI teams out of marketing activities to maintain transparency and effective execution. Watch to gain insights on the dynamics between BI and marketing teams.
Hello everybody, thank you for tuning in. Today I want to talk about BI teams. Does marketing need Business Intelligence? How is the interaction, how are we interacting with BI teams as a marketing team or as a marketing leader.
And I will give you the answer right away. Does marketing need BI? The answer is no.
It’s the other way around. BI needs marketing. BI needs marketing because marketing has data. You as a marketing leader, as a marketing channel manager, as a marketing manager, you have the data, you know what people are doing, what they are clicking on, what the efficiency of your campaign is, what this channel brings in terms of conversion, what that channel brings in terms of customer acquisition cost in terms of new customer, you know this.
As a marketing professional, BI do not need, know this one, based on your channels, so they have to ask you, they have to ask you to get access to the channels, to these reporting, to these tools.
I have been in two situations recently and they ask all these data, which is fine, I mean it’s fair, that as a central business intelligence unit within a company, you are need to know what’s going on in terms of sales, in terms of marketing activities, in terms of production, in terms of basically everything based on data.
The issue I have been facing each time happens on two layers:
First, it’s, it’s highly time consuming to give access to these, to these people and, yeah, follow up with them, all tracking and tracking requirements they have, to Meta, can you give me access to, to Tag Manager, depending on how, evolved, your environment is in terms of, centralized tag management using a tag manager and so on. So it can be, become highly technical and also, time consuming. This is one piece… the time consuming piece, I think it’s fair, if you have in your organization, a BI team, it’s, we have to give them this data, right, they, they need this data, this is fair. You want to be’re transparent, marketing has nothing to hide. And you should not give this impression, right.
The problematic piece is that BI team, once they have the data, reaches out to you, and telling you what to do. I.e. the customer acquisition cost should be measured this way, or the KPI for your marketing activity should be this one. And, on a weekly basis, we want to build you Dashboard, and then we can measure the performance of marketing, and this one is no go.
It is no go. I can only recommend you stop this shit immediately. Why? Because they have no clue about campaigns. They have no clue about what marketing activity is. They have no clue. They know the channels, right? They know what a customer life cycle is, obviously. They know what a customer acquisition cost is, obviously, but they have no clue how to bring this to life and how to execute it. So, to drive your execution, to run your marketing, decently and in a transparent way, get them out of the dashboards, get them out of your marketing reportings.
They can do reporting, they can do whatever they want for BI, for the global CEO, whoever it is. They can pull all these figures together. This is fine, but don’t let them step into your marketing activities. Otherwise, you will be very quickly in the situation that not only it is not fun anymore because you will have to work with dashboards that you have not designed and you have no understanding how they’re working (kind of black box).
But moreover, it is not up to them. The data belongs to your growth team, to your marketing, whatever it is.
You have to own the data and you have, the only way to own your data is to bring up your own dashboard.
I hope that makes kind of sense. I hope that can help you. Feel free to reach out if any questions.