How MarcomCentral® leveraged embedded analytics

Improve efficiencies, drive adoption and increase their customer satisfaction

One of the oldest marketing/advertising stories is about the ad executive who knows that half of her ads are working and half are not. She simply doesn’t know which is which. In many respects, that problem is still an issue today.

MarcomCentral®, a Ricoh company, is a California-based online provider of marketing asset management technology and one of their deliverables for customers is answering that question, precisely and quickly. They discovered that such a task was a lot easier with the help of Sisense.

MarcomCentral® provides an innovative platform that’s useful for modern marketers to empower their corporate users—sales teams, partners, distributors, brokers and franchises—to produce marketing collateral from anywhere in the field.

They use marketing asset management technology that combines digital asset management, dynamic content customization, brand management, and sales enablement all into one platform. Marcom helps centralize and automate the creation, printing, management and delivery of content for creating custom marketing pieces.

Their system is flexible with various options, so adding data analytics is where things can get tricky. MarcomCentral® needed a way to let their customers view and design dashboards while also enabling their customers to work solely with their own data.

MarcomCentral’s prior partner took 6 months to launch their version of what Sisense delivered. For Sisense’s deployment, “it only took 4-6 weeks. We didn’t think that would have been possible,” Seny Sengupta, MarcomCentral® VP of Engineering and Support said.

The partnership between Sisense and MarcomCentral® lets end users run reports of usage metrics on a vast array of individual marketing assets that are deployed through their platforms, sometimes involving thousands of users.

“We need to measure the usage of different marketing tools so that our customers can decide if the investments they made in the campaign are paying off,” said Matt Wallace, MarcomCentral’s General Manager. “Are customers requesting marketing tools that will never be used? That’s why we’re tracking user adoption.”

Sengupta said that this helps deliver solid and provable ROI to their customers. “They are saying ‘Let’s not spend on assets that are not being used.’ The Sisense insights allow our clients to do the most valuable things,” he said.

The combined system allows the MarcomCentral® team to offload work from their customers, making the experience more efficient. “Our clients just get the visualizer. They don’t have to edit the data modules. We do that. We get to make those high-level decisions about the product,” Sengupta said.

MarcomCentral® found that not only did Sisense make life a lot easier for MarcomCentral® people, but it made their customers so much happier because the Sisense-powered capabilities helped them to understand and appreciate the price they were paying.

“Our customers now have an easier time justifying the cost of our product,” said Seny Sengupta, MarcomCentral® VP of Engineering and Support

Another Sisense benefit to Marcom is how intuitive the interface is, which in turn means that companies need fewer people to realize the benefits.  “Our product now allows a client to scale their marketing team to serve a lot of sales teams,” Sengupta said. “That gives them a leg up on their competition. They can say ‘Look at all of these brokers that are accessing our marketing materials.’”

MarcomCentral® VP of Product Management and IT, Audra McKay-Webster, said that the intuitiveness and speed of the Sisense code means that the MarcomCentral® team “can answer questions that we need to answer relatively quickly. Sisense has the nicest user experience that we have seen.”

The efficiency of the Sisense design “means that we don’t need to have a team of 4-5 people maintaining a data warehouse. That’s a huge benefit to us,” Sengupta said.

Everything is really easy to do in Sisense, especially the ease of data modeling and the ease of creating dashboards and reports. If you’re familiar with SQL, it is so very easy to work with Sisense.

But like every business, the ultimate benefit to MarcomCentral® is the value it provides to their customers. “This allows us to deliver a tool for our customers that truly encompasses an end-to-end solution. It is a great and complete solution and the data visualization piece is what really closes that loop,” said McKay-Webster.

As Sisense continually makes improvements to its offering, MarcomCentral® “continues to see more gains from the software. People are using it and it’s just working. The offering that we needed to have with Sisense is to make sure that our existing clients have the same experience or even better. This really was the right decision,” said GM Matt Wallace.