SQL Queries Are Dead: New Beckon [ANSWERS] Query Tool Lets Marketers Ask Natural-Language Questions About Marketing Performance Data, Get Actionable Insight in Return

Beckon [ANSWERS] features a powerful, natural-language interface that allows marketers and analysts to ask a business question in plain language and receive actionable insights in return. Beckon [ANSWERS] guides the user by suggesting viable queries, and uses machine learning to suggest the visualizations that best display the answer to the business question. Marketers can conduct further analysis by refining their questions and drilling into the data, and can easily share insights with others.

With conventional tools, creating charts and dashboards typically requires intermediate SQL, knowledge of data visualizations and a full understanding of the data model. Users often must choose a visualization first, and then "feed" their chart from an overwhelming list of metrics and dimensions. This process makes exploring datasets and getting answers to even the simplest questions too time-consuming and complex for non-technical users, who are often forced to turn to trained analysts for support.

Beckon [ANSWERS] eliminates the need for technical know-how, puts the business question front and center, and vastly speeds up time-to-insight. The clean, simple UI enables easy, intuitive, Q&A-based exploration of marketing data across all channels and sources, without worry about the underlying functionality.

"BI, analytics and dashboarding tools are all notoriously super hard to use. Of course, trained analysts can eventually figure them out, but we don't think 'getting insights from data' should be a specialized skill set," said Beckon CEO Bernardo de Albergaria. "You have a question that your data can answer, so why not just ask your data like you would ask a person? This simple concept rests on top of a huge amount of technical complexity and power, but we've made the technology invisible, which is exactly what great design is supposed to do."

Beckon [ANSWERS] also supports multidimensional queries and calculated metrics, giving marketers flexible ways to slice and dice their data across all channels and offering a broad range of analyses via the same simple UI. The ability to intuitively add or exclude dimensions on the fly lets marketers quickly change the scope of their queries and drill down to the answers they need in order to take action.

For example, consider this nested series of questions that leads a marketer to a clear action:

Question: "Where are we investing our marketing dollars?"

Result: Beckon [ANSWERS] analyzes marketing spend by all channels, regions, and brands. 

Question: "Which messages are resonating best in Spain with our primary target audience of Urban Males 11-17?"

Result: Beckon [ANSWERS] stack-ranks the performance of campaigns run in Spain targeting urban male, 11-17 audiences.

Question: "Given that those are our top-performing campaigns, is the majority of our spend allocated against those ads?"

Result: Beckon [ANSWERS] overlays the amount of marketing spend on top of high-performing campaigns to understand where the brand is underinvesting and where it is overinvesting.

Action: The marketing team can reallocate its spend mid-campaign to maximize ROI.

Fast [ANSWERS] At Warp Speed

The breakthrough power and simplicity of Beckon [ANSWERS] is only possible with Beckon's marketing-specific data schema and proprietary Warp Drive technology.

Marketing spend and performance data comes from disparate sources with multiple owners, involves different datasets and metrics, and has different formulas behind it. Beckon has "mapped the marketing genome" and has a proprietary data schema that defines, integrates and organizes all of it to deliver answers to business questions right out of the box.

Beckon's Warp Drive technology enables interactive queries against large datasets at speeds much faster than traditional tools, often analyzing hundreds of millions of rows of data in seconds. And, it easily scales to handle increasingly large volumes of data and higher levels of data granularity to meet customers' ever-growing analytics needs.

Beckon works with the world's top brands at the forefront of today's agile marketing revolution—The Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup Company, IBM, Nestle, Regal Entertainment Group, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Warner Bros. and more. Recently, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Beckon found that Beckon customers enjoy, on average, a 12.7 percent boost in return on their marketing spend and more than $8.5 million in benefits over three years.

To join the conversation, follow Beckon on Twitter at @BeckonInc or visit the Beckon blog.

About Beckon
Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™, is the trusted data management, reporting, and analytics platform global brands depend on to make effective decisions. The only solution purpose-built for marketing, Beckon provides automated data management, total visibility into cross-channel performance, omnichannel analytics, real-time dashboards and scorecards, and marketing KPIs right out of the box for fast time to value. Beckon is for marketers who want to unlock their data, see what's working across it all, spend wisely, maximize ROI, and show marketing's impact on the business.

Contact
Amanda Roberts
VP Marketing
[email protected]

SOURCE Beckon

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