As I hope you’ve seen so far in the Naked Marketing series, a lot of the big data marketing approach comes down to data plumbing. It’s about integrating different data sources into a single data lake; about maintaining the quality and integrity of that data; and about creating a golden record for each prospect as they progress on their journey to ka-ching.
But all of that data plumbing is worthless if it doesn’t make an impact on the people who actually sell things: the business development managers, field marketers, and salespeople charged with generating the revenue that keeps us all in our jobs.
The place where data turns into insight – where the rubber hits the road – is the dashboard. And that’s what this, the tenth post in the Naked Marketing series, is about.
In the spirit of opening our kimono and sharing everything we do, I’m going to show you something you’d normally need a password and two-factor authentication to access (the data is anonymized or blacked out to protect… well, to protect me).
Our Dashboard
All dashboards pretty much look alike: a cluster of bar charts, tables, and timelines. Here’s ours, created and continuously improved upon by Anish Jariwala, our Digital Marketing Strategy and Analytics Manager:
The magic, of course, is in the actual data contained in all these nifty widgets. So let me take you on a tour:
The Tabs
Our dashboard is actually several dashboards, each with its own tab. I’ve opened the main tab, the home dashboard, but you can see we’ve got different ways to slice our data, each with its own tab and sub-dashboard.
For instance, DB City is a view of the activity within any given city (people from that city visiting our site or interacting with our campaigns). DB stands for Demandbase, our reverse IP-lookup provider we described in post #5, The Big Data Marketing Technology Stack.
The other tabs are pretty self-explanatory: a view by Product, Solution, Form Fills, Web Pages, Marketo ID, etc.
Now for the main sections of the dashboard:
- An ABM View
The top slice of the main dashboard shows what company we’re looking at. That may not seem like a big deal, but it actually changes everything, turning our lead-centric marketing systems (CRM, marketing automation, and web analytics) into an account-based view.
Account Based Marketing is a hot topic and major growth area within B2B marketing and for good reason. It’s based on the simple premise that the biggest B2B purchases are always made by buying teams, not by individuals acting alone.
Getting a clear view of an entire account – and how the people in that account are interacting with you – is an incredibly powerful tool for closing the biggest, most important deals. It makes Account Based Marketing possible.
So I’ll spend most of the time in this post on this page, the Account View.
By the way, the upper right-hand corner of the dashboard is the key to the measures we use throughout the dash. So e1 stands for form completions (visitors filling out a form to download an ebook or other “gated” content) and e12 for form views, etc.
- Visits and Visitors
This slice shows the monthly visits and visitors coming from the selected account, over time. The data comes straight from Adobe Analytics, having already gone through the Demandbase filter to establish the company and industry.
The visit count is always higher than the visitor count because a single visitor can come back many times.
Many of these visitors are still anonymous but some are known, because they filled out a form somewhere. Importantly, we can still associate the anonymous visitor with his or her company, so they’re still included in this account-based view.
- Product and Solution Interest
This horizontal bar chart details the products and solutions that the people in this account are showing the most interest in. It comes from the web analytics: what pages people looked at, what content they consumed, and what forms they completed.
Again, this is hugely important to our sales teams, helping them spot new opportunities within an account that they may not have known about. The sales leaders’ in post #9 talk about how powerful this has been for expanding opportunities and increasing cross-sell.
- Location
Most big companies have many locations. Being able to spot the location of the visitor interacting with us helps us spot likely buying teams and centers of interest within a bigger company.
The list on the right shows the web pages visited from each of the locations identified. The page names are human-friendly (instead of gnarly URLs), so we can easily see the top interests at each location.
We’ve often heard the sales people say things like, “We knew about our Data-as-a-Service deal with the folks in Lexington but we had no idea they were also looking at our Cloud Integration tools.”
- Activity of Known Prospects
This is a hugely powerful part of the dashboard, showing us all the known individuals from this account and their activities (their personal information is blocked out here).
This is one of the key places where the integration between Marketo, Salesforce, and Adobe Analytics comes in (we discuss this in post #5: The Big Data Technology Stack and post #7: The Data For Big Data Marketing).
The table shows:
- Name and Marketo ID
- Whether they’re a lead or contact in Salesforce
- The date of their last web visit
- Their revenue cycle stage
- Their Lattice rating (predicting their likelihood of purchase)
You can imagine how much this helps guide our salespeople to the most interesting prospects – and informs their conversations.
- Content Consumption
This table shows which of the gated content assets on our website were viewed by the people in this account.
The first column shows the content asset, the second shows visitors who viewed the form (e12) and the third column shows the actual form fills (e1). We expect a certain amount of bouncing away from any page with a form on it – but with this view, we can still capture their interest in the content even if they chose not to complete the form.
Again, content interest and consumption are great insights for sales conversations.
- Influencers
This section of our marketing dashboard identifies the most influential people within the account – the people who are sharing links and content with their colleagues.
We use Rio SEO to attach a unique code to the URL of every web page viewed. When that URL is cut and pasted into an email, we can associate the subsequent visit with the original session. That means we can see where our word-of-mouth power is coming from (I go into this more in post #5: The Tech Stack)
Imagine This Dashboard in Your Own Company
So that’s a quick tour of our big data marketing dashboard and the all-important account based marketing view.
When our salespeople first saw this, they used the term ‘game-changer’ a lot. And it really is: for the first time, Marketing is helping Sales spot real opportunities early, and guide the conversations about those opportunities.
That means they spend significantly more of their time on deals that are likely to close and significantly less time on cold calling.
Here’s where I turn into a cheerleader. Because I don’t want you to just look at our dashboard and say, “Wow. That’s cool.” I want you to make one of these for your own company.
Everything represented here is within reach of every B2B company today. The blueprint is here in this Naked Marketing series. All you need is the will to make it happen.
I’m completely convinced that this is the way B2B marketing has to go – and that if you pursue it, your company will sell more and your career will take off.
So go ahead: take the first step. Build the business case.
The Marketing Data Lake in Action
I don’t want you to think that all this power comes from the dashboard itself. In fact, the dashboard is only the shiny surface of our big data marketing program. It’s the critical step in turning our new, integrated data into real insight for our sales teams (and our marketers) – but it’s not where the real data management happens, it’s just where things that are important to our business get visualized.
Underneath the dashboard is the data lake with its ‘schema on read’ structure. And for me, that is the real game changer.
Because our data is in a data lake, instead of a highly structured data warehouse, we can ask any questions we like and build any widget dashboard or report that our sales teams need. And do it without going back to re-engineer anything.
For the first time, our data is in a condition and a place where it can be put to work, in service of revenue.
A Word About Our Data Prep Tool
Anish created this dashboard with the help of Informatica’s data preparation tool.
I don’t want to turn this into an ad for our products but Dataprep accelerated the whole process significantly, so I don’t want to leave it out. Dataprep is essentially a way for non-technical people to prepare data for use. It looks a lot like Excel (by design) and is just about as easy to use, letting you explore, combine, blend, clean and de-dupe your data before exporting it. And do it collaboratively, with your colleagues.
We’re big believers in self-service data management and Dataprep is a great example of this. Why should the data scientist have all the fun?
Naked Marketing, Prologue – “Finally We can Connect All the Dots”
Naked Marketing, Post 1 – “A Big Data Marketing Operations Odyssey”
Naked Marketing, Post 2 – “Who’s Who Behind Our Big Data Marketing”
Naked Marketing, Post 3 – “The 5 Foundations for Big Data Marketing”
Naked Marketing, Post 4 – “The Business Case for Big Data Marketing”
Naked Marketing, Post 5 – “The Big Data Marketing Technology Stack”
Naked Marketing, Post 6 – “Big Data Marketing Checklists for Marketo and Adobe Analytics”
Naked Marketing, Post 7 – “The Data For Big Data Marketing”
Naked Marketing, Post 8 – “The 60-Day Sprint to Our Big Data Marketing Data Lake”
Naked Marketing, Post 9 – “The Sales Leaders’ View of the Marketing Data Lake”
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