How Marketing Reporting Helps You Take The Pulse Of Your Business

Cognos.com Tip: The well-informed business manager uses many sources of information to keep up with trends, opportunities and pitfalls. Some of these are financial; many are technological; while still others are operational. Few sources of news are as pervasive and timely as your marketplace and a quality marketing department.

Using your marketing department as an “early detection system” will provide you with timely information on how changing market conditions can indicate needs for new products and services. This can extend to improvements in sales strategies and corporate policy development. Carefully selecting what information is best used for this purpose is a natural for a good marketing department.

Marketing reporting is the key and BI is the solution. Even a good marketing department must deal with reams of data that can only be gathered, analyzed, and reported in today’s data-rich environment, through the judicious use of technology. For example, sudden reductions in demand for traditionally successful products or services could indicate competitor pressure, market shifts, and/or revenue trouble around the corner. In this example, the facts coupled with the marketing department’s savvy can result in meaningful answers from a good business intelligence system.

Use BI software techniques, like the executive dashboard, scorecards and reporting. They will provide management insight best suited to query systems for market news information, asking questions like:
·Opportunity: What is the profit opportunity?
·Competition: What are the competitive risks to achieving it?
·Product Direction: What is the long-term value?
·Price: What is it worth?
·Demand: How do we reach and communicate value to customers?