Unifying Reporting of Global Marketing Data
Prime 8 develops solutions for complex problems facing business planning teams. We consulted with the consumer marketing group at a global tech company to quickly build a robust, consistent solution to budgeting shortfalls impacting partner marketing for global retail sales. Here’s how Prime 8 identified issues, leveraged opportunities, and lead diverse teams to increase cloud revenue.
The Problem: Unrecorded Spend Causes Budget Planning Chaos
Prime 8 was hired to help the consumer marketing group correct a seemingly simple problem: build a Power BI dashboard that can report on channel spend in real-time to make budget planning more effective. The group needed to see how co-marketing funds were being spent with international retail partners. Specifically, how much was being spent on different marketing channels such as digital ads and in-store promotional events.
However, once discovery began, it became clear the problem wasn’t just optimizing a tool for reporting and forecasting: diverse, global teams were not recording the correct data in the first place. A new process had to be built from scratch, one that redefined how this global group approached spending.
Specifically, we identified these problems:
Critical data was missing across multiple teams - it had never been collected previously in any capacity.
Create a global taxonomy that all teams can use to describe marketing spend.
Build a single source of truth for all budget planning data.
Increase how quickly teams can access budgeting reports to more effectively plan spending.
Identify and improve historical processes that led to this breakdown in reporting and planning.
The Solution: Prime 8 Leverages Data Analytics Expertise
Prime 8 consultants embedded into the sales and marketing group in order to quickly conduct discovery, define requirements and rapidly develop a budgeting planning solution that combined data from disparate sources into a single source of truth.
Here is how Prime 8 resolved diverse problems within the group by planning, building, and executing powerful data analytics.
First, we identified core datapoints that were missing across global teams and creating black holes into reporting.
We led conversations with global teams to quickly gather and share feedback on how a unified data taxonomy would work.
We then developed the backend toolset for true data analytics: connecting data from disparate groups, creating Sharepoint intake forms to standardize data collection, and combining everything into a robust Azure SQL database that could be leveraged by Power BI.
We provided the group with tailored Power BI solution that was a single source of truth for all partner marketing spend and a powerful data analytics engine.
We designed and led a worldwide rollout of the new reporting process and program.
The Result
With our reporting engine in place, the group now has line of sight into global marketing spend in real time. With a clear line of sight into budget forecasts, global teams are able to make data-driven decisions about how to spend their budgets.
Teams can now report on aggregate ROI, specific channel performance, and monitor spend and revenue at granular levels never experienced before.
With universal agreement on a data taxonomy for reporting, the group now has a single source of truth for reporting.
With real-time data analytics and reporting, teams make smarter business decisions and have more lead time to plan their budget strategically.
More accurate forecasting across all teams within the group.
“Getting everyone aligned, across the world, on the same report was the most challenging aspect of this project - more so than building a technical solution for reporting. Our client can be very siloed, we worked hard to break down those barriers and create a single source of truth.”
