Can Low- and No-Code Platforms Turn Marketers Into Data Scientists?
Marketing, at its core, is one of the least scientific fields. It’s a difficult job to properly forecast how consumers will react to your offers and products. However, now that we have the ability to collect data in real-time through social media and other online or offline sources, it has been easier to make predictions about marketing outcomes. With this increased access to data, marketers can finally use their skills in mathematics and computing—skills that were previously not available—to make data-informed decisions on everything from when to launch a campaign to how long an ad should be shown for.
Yet, traditional methods for collecting this information are often time-consuming and expensive. Thanks to low- and no-code platforms, marketers can utilize the power of automation to collect information at scale. This means that marketers can now perform data analysis themselves rather than waiting on data scientists.
Pretty awesome news, right?
Let’s dive into it and understand how the low- and no-code platforms can help turn marketers into data scientists.
Why is marketing difficult?
Mapping customers' journey and creating a 360-degree view of their behavior is not a new concept. With so many customers constantly switching between phones, tablets, laptops and sometimes purchasing offline (in your store or calling a sales rep. directly), marketers seek a unified view of their customers.
Customers increasingly expect one-to-one communication, requiring you to know what they did in the past, what they are currently doing and what they will most likely do in the future. At the same time, companies need to account for new channels, technologies, and data sources. It is challenging for marketers to keep pace with the rapidly changing ecosystem.
The Power of Data
Your customer data is most likely scattered in a dozen different tools and databases; some data resides in your marketing automation tool, other in your CRM or ERP system, maybe on your DMP or Google Analytics account, even on excel spreadsheets and CSV/JSON files. Wouldn’t it be great if you could gather all this data in one central database which would act as a single source of truth for all your marketing, sales and customer data? In that way, your data would be collected, managed and transformed into useful signals that you could later use in order to deliver personalized experiences to your audience, at scale.
A prime example of this is the launch of a marketing campaign. With data collected from social media, you can determine how many people are talking about your brand and what content is performing best. You're able to decide when to launch a marketing campaign based on whether or not there's enough interest in it. It also helps pinpoint what content is resonating with consumers and which audiences are most receptive. For example, if you see that people who live in the the UK and have an annual income of between £25,000-£45,000 are most interested in your product, you can choose to market your product only to them for now before expanding it to other demographics later on.
Low- and no-code platforms give marketers an opportunity to use their skills in math and computing to make data-informed decisions on a daily basis. It also allows them access to more data than they would normally have because there are many more ways for businesses to collect it. Low- and no-code platforms are becoming increasingly popular for this reason, with over 50 percent of marketers surveyed reporting that they use low- or no-code platforms for at least part of their marketing strategies.
What are low- and no-code platforms?
Low-code and no-code platforms are types of visual software development environments that allow enterprise developers and citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them together, create mobile or web apps. These platforms relieve professional developers from writing line by line code in order to build applications quickly.
Additionally they enable non-development professionals like marketers, business analysts or small business owners who don't know how to write code but do understand their purpose for building a certain type of app without learning traditional programming languages such as machine language coding through a configurable platform with minimal knowledge about the development work behind it's components. They see an interface where they can easily marry other third party APIs with these platforms through which users can use products more efficiently than ever before!
Low-code vs. no-code development platforms: What are the differences?
Low-code development requires users to do some level of coding, albeit much less than is required with traditional application development. Professional developers and programmers use low-code to quickly deliver applications, and to shift their efforts away from commodity programming tasks to more complex and unique work that has bigger impact and more value to the organization. For example, a low-code platform can enable you to access information from your CRM, ERP, or other software system through an API. You could then use the API to create reports, mashups, or other interactive visualizations.
No-code development targets nontechnical users in various business functions who understand business needs and rules, but possess little or no coding experience and programming language skills. These citizen developers can use no-code to easily and quickly build, test and deploy their business apps, as long as the chosen tools align with these commodity functions and capabilities.
How do low-code and no-code platforms work?
In conventional software development, programmers write lines of code to create the functions and features desired in a computer program or application. This process is time-consuming for programmers who need in-depth knowledge of computer languages as well as development environments, deployment processes and testing protocols.
Low-code platforms generally encapsulate all that work behind the scenes - by abstracting away these details from developers so they don't have to worry about them when writing codes that represent particular steps or capabilities (which contain the actual code). Developers can create applications with point-and click tools using reusable components linked together visually into their desired workflow.
These platforms allow users to test ideas without having any coding experience at all!
Let that sink for a second.
How efficient your work would be as a Marketer if you could test your ideas without having to involve your IT department?
Why Marketers should pay attention to low-code and no-code platforms?
There's a lot of data to be processed and it can seem like every day there's more information coming in. Marketers need tools that can save them time so they can focus on doing what they do best: generating insights that can fuel them with ideas on how to provide an awesome customer experience.
Low-code and no-code platforms allow marketers to automate tedious processes and create automation for marketing tasks that are time-consuming or don't require specific expertise. They also decrease the learning curve for new staff members, enabling them to ramp up quickly with the help of their platform. With these features, low-code platforms provide marketers with just what they need to get started in the digital age.
These platforms can also be used for forecasting what offer will generate the most revenue, measuring customer satisfaction, and measuring how advertising campaigns affect conversion rates. The low- or no-code platform makes it possible for marketers to not only understand the customer more intimately, but also give them a better understanding of their own business by giving them access to valuable data from other sources.
Bringing it all together, Low- and no-code platforms can help marketers make sense of large amounts of data to find trends and insights to inform their plan. However, before you spend your marketing budget on a low- or no-code platform, it’s important to understand what they can and can’t do. With a little planning, you can ensure that the platform you purchase will meet your needs and help you make the most of your marketing strategy.
Have you purchased a low or no code platform recently?
Get in touch and tell me about your experiences!
