Marketing Technology Q & A with Leo Scott: Making Data Insights Scalable

At WealthEngine, we understand that our customers care a lot about understanding data and gleaning the actionable insights necessary to move the needle. We also know that they care a lot about privacy and data security. So does our Chief Technology Officer, Leo Scott.

Recently, Leo took the time to answer questions we’ve heard are top of mind for our customers from a technologist’s point of view. We’re sharing these as a series here on the WealthEngine blog weekly.

This week he’s talking about making data-driven marketing scalable.

Analyzing and synthesizing large amounts of data can be daunting. What should the first step be for large organizations who want beef up their capabilities here?

Really what companies want is new insight into the operation of their business.  Some companies may already have massive amounts of data and they just need to find a way to extract insight from it.  Other companies may be able to gain insight from the massive amount of data that only exists outside of their company.  Both are a big challenge.  And likely in most cases the best insight can be gained by mixing both internal and external data sources.

Often the tools and services that help in either of these cases can be broken down by use case:

• marketing insight tools
• systems operation tools
• financial tracking tools

The trick is to identify where you need the most insight in your company and then find a good tool or company that can help you improve your insight.  Marketing insight has a particularly rich ecosystem of tools and companies that can help wrangle data no matter whether it’s yours or if it’s coming from outside your  company.

You can use listening platforms to gain insight from social media data, or web analytics tools like Google Analytics, or Chartbeat to gain insight from data collected from your website.

An example of a way to combine your own data with external data is WealthEngine’s Wealth Screening product where you can take, for example, your customer database and append tons of data to your database that enables you to gain great insight.

In WealthEngine’s case we can act as a partner to guide you through the process of extracting the exact insight you want from the data, but in some cases you may be working with tools that don’t give you a full start to finish solution.  In these cases, you will end up doing some of the final slicing and dicing, and visualization yourself in some kind of generic visualization tool.

Everybody starts with Excel because it’s ubiquitous and does a pretty good job of allowing you to slice and dice the data as you analyze it, but there is a new generation of tools that allow you to work with much larger data sets and much more easily generate really insightful charts and visualization.  Tools from companies like Tableau or QlickView can be very useful.
 

Leo Scott is the Chief Technology Officer at WealthEngine.  As an accomplished business executive who founded a number of startup ventures and has worked with a variety of large public companies, Leo has spent the last 20 years building technologies that harness massive amounts of data and enable businesses and consumers to more easily interact with that data through Internet and mobile technologies.  Over the years, he has maintained a hands-on level of experience with the latest technologies, not only tracking the latest trends and tools, but working to develop a deeper working knowledge of new technologies allowing him to see technical approaches and opportunities in unique ways rarely seen by other individuals.

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