Marketing Cloud Intelligence (Datorama): An Introduction to Use Cases

Digital marketing is an ever-growing industry. The average digital marketing team is required to manage over 20+ different digital marketing platforms; whether it be paid search advertising, display, video, social, or programmatic. As consumer and civil life become increasingly online, the popularity of digital platforms will only ever expand…

Nevertheless, when it comes to reporting on the performance of these campaigns, many digital marketers often find themselves facing a challenge – siloed data. That’s where Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence comes in, unifying marketing channel data into one place meaning marketers can easily utilize their first-party data from all platforms.

The Challenges of Managing Marketing Data

Manually extracting data from each platform, exporting/copying that data into a sheet, attempting to align and clean cross-platform data (where possible), then illustrating it in visualizations is a long process. So you may be wondering: if the process is so tedious, why not automate it? This is because popular marketing vendors often lack out-of-the-box data connection functionality beyond the standard CSV download and email schedule.

In order to automate the extraction of data into an analytics or data warehousing tool, data engineers are required to construct their own access to these marketing vendors. As they often switch up their access credentials for security purposes, data engineers are forced to reconstruct their connector codes – imagine having to do this for 20+ marketing vendors!

The siloed nature of marketing data makes gaining an overview of the whole marketing performance tricky, and gaining cross-channel insights nearly impossible. The manual work required to produce the reports leaves space for human error and takes too much time. This impediment prevents marketers from acting on their data and learning from trends as they happen – jeopardizing their ability to optimize their return on investments and return on ad spend.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence 

What is Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama)?

Intelligence is a reporting and dashboarding tool that enables marketers to access and leverage their own first party marketing data. It helps companies understand the performance of their campaigns across the myriad of all their different platforms by unifying that data, all in one place.

How is it different from other BI tools such as Tableau or Power BI?

The key difference is that Marketing Cloud Intelligence was built specifically for marketing data, with the digital marketer in mind. Intelligence enables you to drive growth and return on investment through data-driven decision-making with cross-channel, real-time insights.

Intelligence drives marketers to success by allowing the creation of a marketing system of records through clicks, not code. Offering 100+ ‘click and connect’ APIs to popular marketing and technical vendors including most of your Salesforce products, you can automate data ingestion and provide marketers with a continuous stream of data. 

Intelligence also has its own data storage capabilities, allowing marketers to store, access, and analyze their historical data.

Already have Tableau? Intelligence has an out-of-the-box integration with Tableau, enabling you to connect your marketing data to limitless data exploration. Having both allows you to leverage the best solution for integrating your marketing data with Intelligence whilst aligning your marketing analytics with the rest of the enterprise on Tableau.

Moreover, Intelligence offers smart data modeling capabilities powered by AI. This means that every time a new data stream is added, Intelligence will analyze the type of data source and its data to determine and recommend what they think is the best model to apply to the data.

All you need to do is review, edit, and approve. The UI for data modeling is also very intuitive with drag and drop functionalities, where code is not required – but possible to cater to more complex use cases and custom calculations.

Additionally, marketers have a multitude of options to generate their reports. Whether it is through creative dashboards to visualize their data all through a no-code, drag-and-drop interface; or through classic pivot tables and scheduled reports that can be sent via email.

Not to mention the AI capabilities offered by Einstein Marketing Insights that can be configured and automated to analyze all of the data within the Intelligence platform show key factors that influence your marketing performance positively, and alert you on factors that affect you negatively.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence Use Case

A common use case for Intelligence is for marketers to ingest their various marketing channels (such as, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Google Ads, DV360, Meta, Google Analytics, etc.) and to include these channels into a singular dashboard.

In this way, marketers may simply access one dashboard everyday to be able to check on the performance of all of their marketing campaigns across all of their different platforms, and take action where needed. Marketers can even choose to share these dashboards with their stakeholders (even if the stakeholders don’t have Intelligence user access). 

Already have a reporting and data visualization tool, and not interested in segregating reporting solutions? You can also use Intelligence as an ETL tool that extracts your data from your marketing vendors using various out-of-the-box API connectors, transform the data with Intelligence’s no-code data harmonization capabilities, and load the data into your existing reporting solution.

Summary

With the combination of click-and-connect APIs and smart data modeling capabilities, Marketing Cloud Intelligence aggregates and unifies marketing channel data all into one place. This means marketers will easily have the ability to leverage, utilize and own their first-party data, while taking the manual work out of data connection, data harmonization between channels, and calculation.

All-in-all, with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence, we can let marketers focus on generating insight, to improve ROIs and to make data-driven decisions by giving them a tool that can do it all on reporting, all in one place.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence is the essential tool for every modern digital marketer!