8 Business Intelligence Tools for Content Marketers With Technophobia. You are a content marketer. Second, Sisense also includes visualizations within the tool itself. Cyfe is for people who know what they need to track and want to keep those metrics front-and-center. Segment Segment is an all-in-one data connector that goes beyond dashboards and focuses on compiling, integrating, and even helping you optimize over 200 customer-data integrations. Accordingly, the platform focuses on combining diverse data sets and sources into comprehensive dashboards. This tool, however, does more than just report. What makes SumAll stand out is its automated “Insights” reports. Qlik lets you create visualizations, dashboards, and apps for internal or external audiences that answer their most important questions. Instead, Qlik collects your data from those sources and guides you through the visualization process one step at a time.
You are a content marketer. You care about people, about making real content for real humans that adds value and solves problems. After all, that’s the heart of content marketing.
Unfortunately, all that care and human connection often comes at a cost.
Even in the B2B realm, a mere 6% of respondents in CMI’s 2017 research rated their organization’s content marketing maturity level as “sophisticated” — providing accurate measurement to the business and scaling across the organization. The previous survey looked at challenges and found “measuring content effectiveness” was the No. 2 challenge faced by marketers, second only to creating content itself.
In both those uncomfortable admissions, the keyword is “measure.”
Why do we struggle?
Because most content marketers are technophobic.
Certainly, we muscle our way through tools like Google Analytics. But stepping beyond its familiar dashboards to a business intelligence tool that combines data from multiple sources critical to success fills our souls with dread.
Even worse, many of us work with clients or teams who are just as data-averse as we are. (And yes, that’s true of enterprise-level organizations.)
Cumulative data presented by Forbes makes it clear that marketers who put data at the heart of their efforts outperform their counterparts on just about every front: lead generation, customer acquisition and retention, pricing strategies, product improvement, and even customer relationships that extend “beyond campaign execution.”
To help you cross the divide, I’ve collected and vetted eight business intelligence tools for technophobic content marketers (like me). The first four are designed for enterprise-level organizations ready to take the full plunge, and the last four are specifically chosen for agencies and entrepreneurs looking to get their feet wet.
Sisense
Two must-have ingredients to integrate data — especially big data — into your content marketing strategy are (1) custom dashboards to monitor what matters and (2) baked-in visualizations to bring data to life. Both ingredients make bridging the gap between numbers and decisions far easier than you’d imagine.
Sisense is one of the few data analytics platforms that excels at both. Designed to be used by people with any degree of technical expertise, Sisense walks new users through the setup process and brings together all your data sources into one interface. It also creates personalized dashboards — or lets you build your own — for executives, marketers, e-commerce managers, and more.
Having one central performance data hub coupled with a personalized, role-specific dashboard means you’ll never overlook important findings. And it means you won’t get overwhelmed.
For content marketers in particular, Sisense can map your customer journey — from off-site audience member, to visitor, to lead, to customer — and isolate the content that moved someone from one stage to the next.
Second, Sisense also includes visualizations within the tool itself. Instead of creating your own reports, charts, and graphs from diverse data sets, you can generate them automatically based on the type of insights you’re looking for. It even published a handy, non-gated data visualization wizard to help you choose the best type of data visualization for your project before going all in.
Cyfe
Compared to Sisense, Cyfe is a far simpler, more DIY solution for large and small companies alike. However, this dual focus — and its modest price tag — doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful. With Cyfe, you create your own all-in-one dashboards by adding pre-built widgets that natively integrate with all major data-gathering applications. Plus, with its new Zapier integration, Cyfe offers the largest selection of integrations.
No matter how spread out your data is — online or off — everything is collected in one place. Cyfe doesn’t support unstructured data sources or complex analyses based on blended views, but it’s great for keeping track of what’s happening across the board. No more toggling between platforms like Google Analytics, your CRM, email marketing provider, social networks, keyword campaigns, optimization software, and your internal projects. Cyfe is for people who know what they need to track and want to keep those metrics front-and-center.
Not only does Cyfe save you time, but it also eliminates holes in your data that silos create. Individual platform analytics hide the often widely different performance of traffic versus social shares versus lead generation versus sales. Instead, Cyfe lets you see all that interconnected data at a glance.
Segment
Segment is an all-in-one data connector that goes beyond dashboards and focuses on compiling, integrating, and even helping you optimize over 200 customer-data…
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