Let us quickly dive into the relatively new service – SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and see how it can help your business. Keep reading this post in case you are interested in understanding the challenges of marketing analytics and how to start making effective data mining decisions.

If a company has decided to switch to doing marketing analytics or has already switched, sooner or later, it will need additional resources to cope with all those analytics. You will need to analyze actual sales data, calculate different indicators that show how marketing costs convert into company profits, or search for new customer attributes to obtain more accurate segmentation.

For example, in B2C, customer segmentation is an important task that largely determines the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. There are standard customer attributes: name, address, age, etc. However, today, these attributes are not enough for effective segmentation. It is necessary to create new attributes based on the data, such as the purchase of goods by the client regularly or just before the holidays, how long has passed since the last purchase, the average bill, etc. Marketing analytics helps to study all that data and, based on it, comes up with new attributes to improve segmentation quality.

You may also need ad-hoc data sampling for decision-making or data analysis to prepare machine learning tasks.

And this is where the problem comes in. Traditionally, in many companies, analytical tasks are assigned to the corporate data warehouse (CDW), which plays an important role in all business processes. Support and development of CDW are in the area of ​​responsibility of the IT department.

A business user (in our case, a marketing analyst) expects a very quick response to new analytics requirements, for example, creating reports or data marts or dashboards. Marketing reps also want to achieve a shorter time to market (TTM). At the same time, the IT dept cannot provide this level of service for several reasons:

• All new requests for changes or development must go through a cycle of approval, while pre-formed detailed tech specs are required.
• IT resources are always limited. For each new request, decisions are made based on the priority of implementation, depending on the business effects of a particular decision.

In short, this is another headache, and a good idea can go to the trash bin or to the shelf until better times.

What can be done here not to abandon what has been planned and not turn off the path? In SAP’s opinion, this is the creation of an agile self-service environment for working with CDW data and also outside the CDW framework.

This is where it is convenient to use SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) as an agile environment for business and IT to work with data. DWC allows a business to work with various data sources coming from the corporate landscape or external sources in one place. At the same time, you save on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) due to virtual access to data stored in various systems (CRM, ERP, e-commerce, security solutions, a system for serving ads and making calls, big data storage, and machine learning).

What can be done?

• Build various data samples.
• Combine data from various sources.
• Calculate various indicators.
• Visualize information on dashboards and reports in ad-hoc mode.

In addition, SAP supplies marketing content for DWC. It includes connectors to various sources, such as social networks like LinkedIn, as well as marketing data models, dashboards, and reports.

This all allows a business to start building marketing analytics from scratch. This is convenient since you already have a starting point, and you can further complement your tasks.

As a result, you get a reduction in time to market, reduce business dependence on IT, increase IT efficiency and security by entrusting SAP to protect you from modern threats, and finally move to agile in the field of analytics. And you get beautiful, informative reports that will definitely help top managers in making important decisions.