Transforming VMO2's marketing insights

We were engaged by VMO2, the UK’s largest mobile network, to assist their Business Marketing team in developing a comprehensive data mart, a repository that takes data directly from marketing sources and transforms this into an optimal format for business analysis, and dashboard aimed at enhancing performance metrics.

Following a recent merger and other organisational changes, VMO2 Business Marketing team required support to develop tools enabling them to interrogate and analyse their operating metrics. The team used various tools to generate and track business ‘leads’, but these systems are not integrated nor easy to report on. This makes it difficult for the Marketing team to analyse the Return on Investment for marketing campaigns and other factors that drive their success.

VMO2’s key requirements included having easy access to all required marketing data sources within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data lake and improving trust in the data. The data often contained missing or incorrect values, as well as other errors, including limited existing integration between source datasets. These challenges needed innovative approaches to data engineering, analysis and reporting.

We used extensive stakeholder engagement, alongside strong problem solving and analytical engineering approaches.

1. The team first developed a scalable and flexible data mart using dataform and Google BigQuery. This facilitated the seamless integration of data sources that arrived at varying stages throughout the project and enables continued scaling of the data mart in the future.

2. We then performed rigorous data quality and validity checks, incorporating these into a dataform pipeline. All the checks are built into the data mart and will automatically raise errors with VMO2’s data engineering team if issues arise in the future. Known and anticipated issues with the source data were documented and communicated to the client during the project handover.

3. A Power BI dashboard was developed based on industry best practice. Utilising these principles, we created a scalable, robust, and flexible product which can evolve to the meet the demands of a digital marketing workforce. Using the available data, the dashboard satisfies the client requirements and offers a valuable new reporting capability.

A commitment to proactive stakeholder engagement enabled the data mart and dashboards to satisfy both the strategic and tactical requirements of VMO2. We worked across three different teams within VMO2 and interfaced with both dashboard end users, external contractors, and salespeople. This enabled us to refine the initial client requirements, minimise assumptions about the data sources and ultimately, making sure that the data mart and dashboards were fit for purpose. We regularly engaged key stakeholders and users of the dashboard to help them feel ownership of the project. Our commitment to documentation and collaborative development has provided a seamless handover process, facilitating the integration of our solutions into VMO2's existing workflows.

The dashboards enabled VMO2’s Marketing team to drive evidence backed discussions with other areas of the business in efforts to improve their collective performance. The effort also highlighted some of the key data gaps that exist within VMO2’s Marketing architecture and have given the business a clear understanding of where targeted training, process standardisation and data quality checks should be implemented.

Our solution facilitated a shift in VMO2's data management practices. By embedding robust data management frameworks and fostering data-driven decision-making processes, we enabled to handle the challenges of the digital landscape more confidently and flexibly.