Domo Marketing Analytics: A Case for Rapid Data Discovery
Domo is a tool that has stood out among the many data discovery-oriented analytics solutions now hitting the market thanks to how quickly it can have a practical impact on specific functional or industry business cases. It represents the realities of modern business:
- The questions organizations ask to support decision making are constantly evolving.
- Traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions aren’t flexible enough to cope with the speed of these changes.
- Business leaders need tools that enable them quickly, not tools they fight to use.
Domo helps fill these gaps with fast, accurate results in time for them to matter. In this article, we’ll briefly touch on Domo’s capabilities and then explore one of the use cases where it excels, marketing analytics, to get a practical understanding of the impact this platform can have on a business.
Domo Described
Domo is a cloud-based, scalable business management platform that provides an integrated set of data connectors and visualization tools aimed at shortening the time and effort required to get from data to action. Domo provides an easy-to-use set of tools that allow non-technical users to cover the journey from data sourcing to presenting stunning visualizations that users can interact with and share through multiple channels. Domo’s delivery mechanism is based on the pyramid shown below.
The components shown in Domo’s pyramid are as follows:
Connect: Domo has built-in connectors to your data sources; hundreds of them (and more being developed regularly). Connect to data by yourself in many cases with just a username and password.
Prepare: Got data that needs to be blended together or have reference tables that live only on a personal spreadsheet? You can easily bring them together and automate the process so your data always stays current.
Visualize: Choose from a variety of visualizations to make sure the data you have is represented in a way that is eye opening. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Engage: Have discussions with others right within the tool using DomoBuzz. Know how many views a particular card is getting and who is viewing it.
Optimize: Be alerted to changes via text or email when things happen instead of being glued to your monitor or missing events entirely.
Example: Fast, Flexible Domo Marketing Analytics
A typical marketing department constantly needs fresh data to ensure the timeliness of content, emails, events, calls to action, and offers. For instance, an A/B test comparing two different display options only matters if you see results in time to change your next newsletter, conversion point, or message to the format that got the best engagement. Unfortunately, in a traditional business intelligence environment this kind of quick turnaround is rarely possible. Let’s step through an example to see why.
The Pain Is Common
Say you’re a marketing director in a company that has both a robust marketing department and a robust IT department, but IT supports the whole organization, not just marketing. If a company like this runs only on a traditional, mode 1 BI system sourced from a data warehouse, both of which IT controls, then there will be many data requests that rank higher than marketing’s, such as operational efficiency reports, sales performance, and regional revenue numbers.
The Pain Causes Issues
The delay on marketing requests isn’t the IT team’s fault, it’s just physically impossible to take in every request in a timely manner. Of course, the result for marketing is that their customer analytics data is often stale and they’re always a step behind what’s really happening.
Domo Fits the Need
If we add a Domo marketing analytics approach into this scenario, answers come in minutes instead of weeks. It allows marketing to make repeatable, trackable dashboards fast while also freeing IT up to focus on core enterprise BI needs. Marketing analysts using Domo can easily connect to and integrate information from Salesforce, Google Analytics, marketing automation platforms like Eloqua or Marketo, social media feeds, and enterprise data from a data warehouse like regional revenue and sales to view the entire market landscape.
Dashboards in 5 Minutes
While you’re building connections from Domo, you can use Domo QuickStart Apps like the ones they have for Salesforce and Google Analytics to get a full dashboard going from those sources within 5 minutes of logging in. You’ll literally be able to see results on your first day with the tool, which is invaluable to a fast-paced marketing team.
Continued Refinement
You can also adjust your approach over time and build out your own dashboards and visualizations that slice the information relevant to you in different ways. These intuitive displays are quick to understand and can be presented directly to company leadership to illustrate marketing’s impact. The effects of your latest A/B test will show in real time as they appear in your data sources, and Domo will bring the changes into your dashboard automatically. It will also suggest optimal visualizations for you to use, and new QuickStart Apps get added on the Domo Appstore all the time so you can always plug and play the options from there that fit for you.
Interaction across Functions
The other upside to using Domo marketing analytics strategies is that IT can maintain oversight on your activities and ensure data quality. Through DomoBuzz, you can share out your results to stakeholders and see their feedback directly in the platform. You can dynamically update based on input from executives and fellow marketers and vet your data against what others are seeing in their parts of the organization. The result is an analytics solution that functions at the pace of your business needs and remains integrated with the larger analytics strategy of your company.
The Bottom Line: Where Domo Fits
Domo shifts the conversation and effort at your organization away from “how will we implement a business intelligence platform?” and toward “what kind of questions can we get answered with our analytics tools?” Domo implementations start with discussions about KBRs (key business requirements) rather than installation and infrastructure specifications. These help direct focus to actions that impact the decision making process.
Ironside is excited to be blending our vast analytics expertise with innovative tools like Domo. We’ve worked with multiple clients to get Domo implemented and have seen them realize immediate benefits from this responsive data discovery tool. Let us know if you’d like to explore how Domo could fit in your organization’s analytics roadmap.
If you see some valuable ways you could put Domo to work at your organization, Ironside can help.
About Ironside
Ironside was founded in 1999 as an enterprise data and analytics solution provider and system integrator. Our clients hire us to acquire, enrich and measure their data so they can make smarter, better decisions about their business. No matter your industry or specific business challenges, Ironside has the experience, perspective and agility to help transform your analytic environment.