BACKGROUND
Strategic Research Insights (SRI) is a strategic marketing consulting firm based in New Jersey, providing services to numerous Pharmaceutical and Fortune 500 firms. The company specializes in qualitative and quantitative research as well as Big Data analytics.
SRI was hired by FedEx to setup and manage several marketing campaigns for them. At one point in time, SRI was simultaneously managing around 50 different campaigns for FedEx, but they lacked a useful tool/dashboard to monitor and track their success. As a result, SRI was showcasing marketing campaign ROI & Analytics information using static PowerPoint presentations to FedEx. This process was cumbersome, time-consuming, and did not represent real-time data.
Based on a request from FedEx, SRI was in search of a technology partner to build a custom application that could generate campaign effectiveness reports from their marketing data and display on a dashboard. This in turn would help FedEx make data-driven, informed business decisions such as budget allocation, campaign collateral enhancement, and more. After in-depth market research, SRI chose Asahi Technologies to be their technology partner as we best matched their expectation on experience, technical expertise, budget, and timeline they were seeking to get this done by.
SOLUTION
- ✓We started by designing the dashboard for the marketing analytics application.
- ✓We then built a custom web application that connected with several third-party systems using SOAP, REST, JSON, and other tools to query data from FedEx’s many campaigns setup by SRI.
- ✓The application authenticated against and queried data from several third party marketing automation tools such as Silverpop and Marketo, and CRMs such as Sugar CRM.
- ✓The application then rendered the data such as total spend, leads generated, deals closed, revenue to spend ratio and other such metrics visually using the appropriate graphical representation, namely charts/graphs built using Chart.js, a robust, reliable, and Open Source library.
To be able to extract meaningful metrics from the marketing applications and display on the dashboard, we had to review the documentation and understand the integration end points of at least a dozen different systems. Since some of these systems didn’t have well-defined and in some cases missing documentation, our team had to run numerous trials to be able to understand vital information that pertained to retrieving useful and valuable campaign metrics.
RESULTS
The new marketing dashboard created by our team provided useful analytics information from all data sources in real-time. As a result, the marketing leadership team at FedEx had valuable insights and visibility into the effectiveness of each campaign, and its performance in comparison to the others. This directly impacted business decisions made by the marketing leadership team.
BENEFITS
- ✓SRI could now present aggregated data from 50 different marketing platforms in one cohesive marketing dashboard.
- ✓The new dashboard enabled FedEx to ascertain that more than 10 marketing campaigns were not yielding meaningful results which then meant reinvestment of those marketing dollars on those that did work
- ✓FedEx was able to save more than 30% off its marketing budget, which for a company at that size equates to several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- ✓This solution allowed the management team to generate quarterly, semi-annual, and annual projections with revenue, advertising investment effectiveness, and impact on employee and community
