Feb 11, 2025
•1 minute read
SAP Marketing Analytics
What Is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics involves evaluating data to determine how marketing activities performed and where opportunities exist. According to an Aroscop blog, chief marketing officers “are pouring money into marketing analytics to plan a great brand strategy. They are expected to spend over 11% of their total budget on analytics. Companies that don’t put data at the center of their marketing and sales decisions could miss out on a 15-20% increase in their marketing” return on investment.
What Is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics involves evaluating data to determine how marketing activities performed and where opportunities exist. According to an Aroscop blog, chief marketing officers “are pouring money into marketing analytics to plan a great brand strategy. They are expected to spend over 11% of their total budget on analytics. Companies that don’t put data at the center of their marketing and sales decisions could miss out on a 15-20% increase in their marketing” return on investment.
Digital marketing opens more channels to engage with customers and glean insights for revenue opportunities, new product development, and consumer base expansion. Companies can leverage analytics within a few categories of marketing analytics, according to Kumar Singh, Research Director for SAPinsider. Those include:
Descriptive analysis. This type of analysis is used when a quantitative summarization of data is required. For example, when analyzing the purchase history of a national hardware store’s inventory, a descriptive analysis can identify which products are best-selling nationally.
Diagnostic analysis. A diagnostic analysis can help explain why certain trends occur. For example, if a product that usually sells well during a seasonal promotion has lackluster sales, diagnostic analysis can help explain why.
Predictive analysis. With predictive analysis, there’s a need to understand what can occur in the future based on current and historical data. Machine learning algorithms are an integral part of predictive analysis. For example, a retailer can analyze how best to replenish their inventory based on consumer buying habits.
Marketing Analytics Within SAP Marketing Cloud
Within SAP Marketing Cloud, users can perform marketing analytics — yielding real-time marketing data for campaigns. Two key capabilities for marketing analysis are analytics stories and operational reporting.
- Analytics Stories. According to SAP, use analytics stories for agile and exploratory marketing data analyses. “The analytics stories come from SAP Analytics Cloud but are fully embedded inside SAP Marketing Cloud. Analytics stories can use charts, visualizations, texts, and pictograms to describe data.”
- Operational Reporting. According to SAP, “Use operational reporting for daily reporting to answer specific analytical questions areas and slicing and dicing on the available dimensions and measures.”
Vendors in the marketing analytics space include: AllSight, Focused Impressions Technology, Nvizion Solutions, and Knack Systems.
Leveraging Machine Learning on Customer Intelligence DataA key area that SAPinsiders highlight as one of the top business challenges: evolving customer expectations and demand. This has emerged as a top business driver in many of our research reports, including the most recent report, SAPinsider Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA. To meet the rapidly evolving customer expectation and demands, organizations need to understand their customer better, and this is where customer intelligence (CI) comes into play. In simple terms, CI is all about gathering and analyzing customer data to understand your customers better. Considering the increased focus in this area, we have a research report focused on CI scheduled to be published in Dec 2022. This article discusses the advantages of building CI capabilities and explores the key elements required to build this capability. But as with every other capability that incorporates "intelligence", analytics also plays a big role in the customer intelligence area. Many CI tools already leverage advanced ML-based algorithms. Even if the tool you use does not leverage ML algorithms, you can build customized Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that leverage your customer intelligence data inexpensively using open source tools. In this article, we share some areas where ML algorithms leverage, or can leverage, data from CI tools.
Jul 1, 2022
•4 minute read
Epsilon Builds A Single Source of Truth To Empower Marketing EffectivenessBy Alex Soto, Editor, SAPinsider With evolving consumer expectations and behaviors and dynamic shifts in business and society, marketing organizations often sit at the tip of the digital transformation spear. Specifically, chief marketing officers (CMO) are under pressure to transform their digital marketing strategies to better meet customer demands, elevate their organizations’ brands, and support […]
Jul 16, 2021
•5 minute read
Video: Learn How SAP HANA Cloud Enables Epsilon to Digitally Transform Its Customers’ Marketing Data and SystemsWhen a marketing and communications organization falls behind in meeting its customers’ evolving expectations, behaviors, and demands, business suffers.
In connecting technology with the business, a marketing leader can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing communications programs to meet customers where they live. But in going through digital transformation, marketing leaders mostly see things from a marketing perspective.
Epsilon, the leader in outcome-based marketing for top global brands, agencies, and publishers, underwent its own digital transformation while supporting the changing data needs of its customers.
In this story, the digital transformation started from within Epsilon’s walls. Internal customer implementation processes were arduous and ineffective. To address the problem, the company leveraged SAP technology to develop a single, streamlined SAP architecture. The solution - SAP HANA Cloud running on AWS - serves as the company’s single source of truth.
Additionally, with SAP technology at the center, Epsilon is helping its customers build more effective marketing programs. One example includes a customer with a goldmine of data, but it was mismatched and lived across disparate systems.
Epsilon helped the customer address challenge by making the customer’s data more concise. A key aim was to help the customer achieve the same business value but with a smaller footprint solution. After cleansing the data, Epsilon guided the customer in its transition into an SAP HANA Cloud environment.
In this SAP HANA Cloud implementation case study, Epsilon shares key challenges and learnings about the digital transformation journey in marketing organizations.
Read this customer story and learn:
- How Epsilon combines SAP HANA Cloud and best data practices to help optimize marketing communications programs for its customers.
- Why a knowledgeable SAP service partner is vital to a marketing organization's effort to connect business and technology.
- What role a single source of truth system plays in helping marketing organizations extract more value from data.
- About how implementing SAP HANA Cloud as a technical foundation of a digital transformation journey requires staying on top of changes to ensure customer project success.
Jul 16, 2021
•1 minute read
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