Marketers are increasingly expected to use data to make smarter, faster decisions, reallocate spend on-the-fly, and continually prove marketing’s impact on the business. While marketers have no shortage of data, integrating it from disparate sources and formats into a consolidated, cross-channel view so they can use it to understand how to better spend their next marketing dollar is a constant challenge.
Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™ and partner to many of the world’s biggest brands, today announced new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that automate the complex process of transforming messy marketing data into actionable insights in seconds. Beckon’s AI functionality is immediately available to all new and existing customers as a core component of its world-class marketing intelligence platform.
With the application of AI, Beckon analyzes marketing data at the source, enforces it against Beckon’s universal data model, and applies it to Beckon’s proprietary library of industry best practices to seamlessly anticipate business questions and generate insight reports and dashboards in a single click. Not only does this cut down on data integration, preparation and cleansing time, but it offers easier, more intuitive ways for marketers to add new data sources, interact with data, interpret insights and act on the findings.
According to Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey, 48% of marketing leaders say their marketing analytics teams are spending their time preparing the data to be analyzed, rather than actually analyzing it, and another 45% say their analytics staff spend their time doing foundational activities like data visualization and data preparation. This comes as no surprise since existing methods of creating marketing dashboards or cross-channel reports take too long, require technical expertise and are error-prone. Getting to impactful reports and dashboards requires a series of critical steps: data ingestion, cleansing, mapping, enrichment, visualization, and more. Each step in the process—from connecting to a data source, to preparing the data, to selecting what visualizations best answer a business question and identifying the data needed to support the question—requires specialized knowledge and tools that are now dramatically reduced, or in some cases eliminated, with the application of AI.
“The reality is that most marketing performance measurement projects take months to implement or don’t get off the ground at all because of the sheer volume of work, resources and expertise it requires,” said Bernardo de Albergaria, CEO of Beckon. “Beckon taps into the power of AI to help brands dramatically move up the starting line. Instead of digging through piles of data trying to determine what’s useful, what’s not, and how to structure it, our customers kick-off with good, clean, structured data flowing, and user-friendly visualizations to quickly provide actionable insights. They get instant value in just a couple of clicks, and then can begin to iterate and customize with a solid data and reporting foundation in place.”
Beckon partners with the world’s top brands—The Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup Company, Nestle, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Union Bank, Post Consumer Brands, and more—to address their most complex data challenges. Applying AI to Beckon’s library of best practices allows customers to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and learn from fellow industry leaders on the forefront of data-driven marketing in record time.
“After years of partnering with global brand leaders to help them make better, faster decisions with data, we’ve learned what business questions are most likely top of mind and which visualizations best drive understanding and action,” said de Albergaria. “Anyone can create a report. With our new AI capability, brands go a step further by quickly connecting data and getting expertly crafted dashboards for actionable insights on the spot.”