Why I built my own marketing intelligence tool

I’ve always had a real interest in automating marketing reporting and systems, which I can trace back to my insights analyst role back at Branded3 (much credit to my amazing manager at the time, Alan Ng).

It started with the likes of connecting our Zoho CRM with Zapier to a live Google Sheet to pull in lead data and combine with Supermetrics API for Google spend and traffic data to build a live reporting & lead scoring system.

Later transitioning to Datorama, a more advanced marketing intelligence tool but that still didn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem.

Then the era of AI, and suddenly an opportunity to approach the whole problem differently.

The Problem

Salesforce, Google Analytics, Ads, Search Console, Spreadsheets, Manually Analysing Data. The information existed, but required jumping between systems, and hours and hours of time to pull and analyse the data to make it actionable.

We weren’t short of the marketing data, we were short of a way to make sense of it. Even Datorama lacked in that respect, a large data tool but it wasn’t particularly intelligent and still took hours to build reports and harmonise data.

It just wasn’t efficient.

The Questions That Prompted Change

From a traditional marketing perspective, the old systems got by. I could see cost per leads, individual channel performances and even conversion rates, but my focus became more and more on the commercial outcome.

CPL alone doesn’t tell you if your marketing is working.

Which keywords are actually monetising? I could see which leads had converted to contracts, but to delve deeper to a keyword level, all the way to monetisation wasn’t an easy task.

Where was spend actually delivering true value? On the face of it, some campaigns and channels looked great, they “costed in”, but what effect did that have on a small sales team, where we delivering too many leads that caused burnout and actually reduced conversion rates of other areas, again something that was very difficult to work out.

Could we identify problems early rather than explain them retrospectively? Sure, we had a crude way of lead scoring, but again it didn’t extend to monetised opportunities and true ROI.

Why I Built It

I’m not a software developer, but I understood the problem. We are in a relatively complex industry where leads can go down a lot of varied journeys and we weren’t getting the full picture of what was actually happening.

Throughout the journey of various different advancements in reporting, although we made steps in the right direction, there was no perfect solution and a lot of the business decisions we made required days of collating data & analysing it to make.

AI-assisted development makes it possible to build something specifically tailored to your business and reporting requirements. The ability to combine and merge data from multiple sources in seconds, generate reports in minutes and use LLMs to help you interpret the information.

What Does It Actually Do?

It’s a complete marketing tool kit. Well, when I say complete, that’s not true, it's a constantly developing and ever changing system that continues to show and analyse information in a fraction of the time it used to take.

It’s since evolved into a tool that also manages the KPIs for the sales team, creates scorecards and training actions, and so much more - but that’s for another blog.

All of that, and it can automatically deliver reports to Senior Leadership as frequently as required, significantly cutting down meeting time.

Capability	Business benefit
Connected marketing and CRM data	One view of acquisition and commercial outcomes
Keyword-level attribution	Better understanding of what actually generates contracts
AI-assisted lead scoring	Additional insight into lead quality
PPC pacing	Better visibility of budget utilisation
Automated marketing, sales and SLT reporting	Less manual reporting and more consistent information
Monetisation reporting	Improved visibility of downstream commercial performance

That’s just a snippet of what the tool is capable of, you can read more about the Nexus Marketing Intelligence tool in my work section.

What Building It Taught Me

It might sound cliche, but imagination is the only limitation. You don’t have to be a traditional developer to create useful technology, you just need an understanding of the business problem.

Start with exactly that, the problem. You’ll often find that it isn’t the fact the business doesn’t have the information you need, it’s just scattered amongst several platforms or hard to analyse and link everything together manually.

Once you’ve connected the dots, the sky is the limit.

In Summary

Building Nexus reinforced something for me, something I’ve come to believe more strongly over the years - some of the best opportunities to improve a business often sit outside the lines of anyone's job description.

As a marketer you need to have an interest and understand every part of the business to truly understand and importantly impact ROI.

I didn't set out to become a software developer. I had a problem I understood, years of experience working around it, and suddenly the tools to do something about it.

That's what excites me most about AI. Not the ability to generate more content or produce another dashboard, but the opportunity to turn ideas that previously required significant time, money and resources into practical solutions.

The real advantage isn't knowing how to use AI. It's knowing what problems are worth solving.