Are you ready to take your reporting on Creative operations to the next level? Data Warehouse for inMotion ignite enables creative teams to get more out of their data by unlocking the ability to produce custom visualizations and dashboards using both creative operations data and cross-departmental data in their preferred Business Intelligence (BI) tool. Here are 5 ways you can leverage Data Warehouse for inMotion ignite to enrich your approach to business intelligence.

1. Demonstrate your value as a strategic partner and get access to performance data
Creative teams are important strategic partners to their organizations. The 2020 In-House Creative Management Report found that 89% of respondents agreed that creative work is important to driving business objectives. It’s important for creative teams to speak the language of business and use data to connect their work to business outcomes. Data Warehouse for inMotion ignite offers creatives teams a unique opportunity to dig deeper into their own data and prepare custom reports, visualizations, and dashboards. Creative teams now have unprecedented access to combine their own data sets with that of other areas of the business to effectively highlight the creative contribution.

2. Visualize your data
Data visualizations play a major role in helping us understand what the data is trying to tell us so that we can take action on those insights. For example, a bubble chart can quickly show you how your team’s time was portioned between all your projects in a month. Or, use a bar chart to show you a month-to-month comparison of how many requests your team received.

The reason that data visualizations are so powerful is that they transform overwhelming datasets into a meaningful story. Here are some tips from Storytelling with Data:

1. Understand the context of the data
2. Choose an effective visual
3. Eliminate the clutter of unnecessary data
4. Focus attention on the main points you want to make
5. Tell a story

Visualizations are also helpful for tracking progress on important ongoing metrics. For example, you can set up a progress bar to show how much of your team’s monthly bandwidth has been assigned to projects so far. Pick your most important metrics to track each month, set up a visual dashboard in your BI tool, and display a live view on a large monitor in the office or send out a link to your team to increase visibility for the whole team into key metrics.

3. Use data to prioritize strategic direction
According to the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report, only 17% of creative teams “almost always” or “often” get feedback on the performance of their creative work in-market. According to Ilise Benun of Marketing Mentor, the reason for that is all about ease of use: “The marketing team has data, but they aren’t providing it. The creative team has to make it easy for the marketing team to pass that data over.” Data Warehouse for inMotion ignite makes cross-departmental data sharing easy.

For example, the creative team could combine their data about total production times or LOE with marketing email and social data to find projects that are low effort but high impact. Another useful data combination would be to look at CRM data to see which creative assets drive the most new opportunities for sales. This allows the creative team to learn more about what kinds of creative resonate the most with prospects.

4. Executive dashboards
Providing executives with quick access to information is important. That’s where dashboards come in! Identify what the most important metrics are to the executives you regularly report into, and use Data Warehouse for ignite along with your company’s preferred BI tool to build an automatically updated dashboard that shows metrics like the creative team’s current workload, current project statuses, and up-to-the moment performance stats for current projects.

To learn more about Data Warehouse for inMotion ignite and how your team could leverage custom visualizations, dashboards, and cross-departmental data access, schedule your custom demo today!

Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual In-House Creative Management Report for 3 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 1,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.