Mapping Actionable Insights In 5 Steps With Tableau

We’ve all heard talk about data and our need to use data, however, we’ve also heard about 50% of all data projects not resulting in a return on investment(ROI). Last week, we discussed the benefits of using Tableau to see the opportunity, so let’s dig a little deeper and look at your target audience versus your current market segment.

I’ve talked about advertising in the past and the benefits of using dynamic advertisements with Google, but it may be beneficial to take a look and see if your advertising target is reaching your target market segment. One of my favorite visuals in Tableau is the map. Based on how narrow your market segment, you can see how your customer market is represented across the United States and how that compares to your advertising reach.

Creating a visual map in Tableau is really quite easy, so long as you have your data broken out by address – city and state. You can easily export your customer and prospect lists from your CRM such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, OnePage, Salesforce (who owns Tableau), or any of the other CRM applications mentioned in the Marketing Technology Landscape listings. You can also download your customer addresses from your financial software such as Quickbooks, or Freshbooks. Don’t forget to clean up your data first prior to loading it into Tableau.

Once you load your excel spreadsheet into Tableau as a data source, you can start creating a nice visual map. This map view of your current customer market becomes an “actionable insight” helping you to see where you can focus your advertising dollars, event attendance, staffing, or marketing tactics in order to hit your targets. In just 5 steps, you can have a beautiful visual of how your clients are positioned across the United States.

1. Click on the bottom of the screen to add a new sheet to create the map view.

2. First, we will start with the Measures which are at the bottom of the left navigation box.

3. The first step is to drag from the dimensions on the left the ‘longitude’ into your columns and ‘latitude’ into the rows fields.

4. Next, we will work with the Dimensions which are on the top of the left navigation box.

5. Drag your clients into the Marks box and drag it over the color box in the Marks box. This will highlight all the states as colors across the map.

6. Next, drag the state into the Marks box to filter by state.

7. Next, go back to your Measures and pull in the # of records. This will show the number of clients per state

8. Lastly, click on the Label in the Marks box and check the box that says, “Show mark labels.” Once you check this box, you will immediately see the number of clients in each state.

In just a few steps you now have a beautiful visual of how your company has grown. This map provides quick insights into which states have the most customers, you can even ad total revenue into the view so you can break out your sales revenue by state and continue to build out more ‘actionable insights.’

The next time you think about how you need to ‘map out a plan,’ reach for Tableau and get started with creating a beautiful and actionable plan with data you already have in your hands.