Use Of Business Intelligence In Marketing

Let us understand the relationship between marketing, data, and business intelligence and then explore the role of business intelligence in marketing.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence covers all the technology and strategies that companies use to analyze data and manage the information they receive. Business Intelligence uses specialized software and other tools to draw insights from the data collected and serves up these insights as actionable findings that a company can use to plan its growth, strategy, and business plans. Companies can also use Business Intelligence to fine-tune or improve internal processes.

Data filtered through the business intelligence system of a company are usually presented through findings in the form of reports, graphs, dashboards, and other visual representations. Data is typically housed in central storage systems called databases or data warehouses.

Marketing and data management in the digital age

Marketing today has become highly digitalized, increasing the customer engagement channels. Companies can interact with customers on the shop floor through digital advertising, CRM, email, social media, and many other media. All these touchpoints generate massive amounts of data, and companies’ marketing teams have to collate, analyze, and present data to the decision-makers.

Marketing teams, faced with this deluge of data, need to organize the raw data into relevant and meaningful insights and actionable inputs to improve business decisions and customer-facing initiatives in marketing and sales. This is where business intelligence for marketing comes in.

How can marketing use business intelligence?

There are six broad areas in which marketing can use business intelligence systems or software that can help it design campaigns and offers that are on-trend and in real-time:

1. Examine and analyze customer purchase patterns and behavior to design products or services that match current trends.

2. Highlight products or services that sell the most in given markets and determine improvement areas for low-selling goods.

3. Manage sales/marketing processes better with real-time data analysis and help identify new market opportunities.

4. Improve information sharing for better marketing efficiency and productivity.

5. Grow sales efforts and conversions by examining how the customer interacts with the brands/company at various touchpoints.

6. Get better information on competitors’ actions and plans and plan responses more effectively.

It is important to note the difference between “business analytics” and “business intelligence.” Business analytics is about process management – using data to improve specific processes. Business intelligence is much more than process-specific – it is a powerful analysis and reporting tool that can help companies transform their entire business approach.

Role Of Business Intelligence In Marketing

Marketing is a vast treasure trove of data today, thanks to digitalization. But making sense of this raw data and compiling it into relevant and actionable insights requires a lot of effort. Business intelligence can play a leading role in this aspect by enabling marketing teams to receive, visualize and report data that everyone can understand.

Here are the main areas in which business intelligence can play a critical role in marketing:

1. Enable correct data queries: Business intelligence tools or software helps the marketing team query the dataset correctly to define suitable result areas (KPIs).

2. Help identify and focus on the right customer base: Marketing is all about “sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.” Business intelligence solutions can collect customer data from a multitude of sources and can serve up a unified view of the attributes of various demographics.

3. Simplify reports: Business intelligence provides real-time data that needs to be actioned without delay for actionable insights. A delay could mean a loss of marketing effectiveness or sales revenue. Standardized, simple-to-use reports can save the marketing teams time and help them focus on solutions.

4. Provide better accuracy in forecasts: Better forecasts lead to better sales planning and performance. Business intelligence helps generate faster marketing or sales forecasts to take advantage of rapidly evolving market dynamics.

How can business intelligence help digital marketing?

Companies expect a lot more these days from the approximately 10% of revenues they typically spend on marketing. Essentially, companies want more customers, more sales, and more revenue per customer! The growth of digital marketing enables companies to go deeper into the customer purchase cycle and associate their brands with many more granular touchpoints than was possible earlier.

Marketing teams can use business intelligence to review and report trends and developments in the marketplace that can help the company improve its marketing effectiveness considerably.

Business intelligence in digital marketing is a win-win situation for the marketer and the consumer. The data generated by digital marketing can be converted into real-time and relevant insights that can help the company develop more valuable products and services to satisfy the evolving needs of consumers through their life cycles. The ability to get insights into competitor activity is also a massive boost for the adoption of business intelligence in digital marketing structures.

Business intelligence helps digital marketing in several significant ways:

1. Better audience identification and targeting

a. Marketing only works when the right message is sent to the right customer at the right time and place.

b. With business intelligence tools, marketing can better identify and target its audience.

c. A large number of datasets available through multiple digital touchpoints can be structured well enough for marketing to capitalize on it.

2. Identify customer behavior trends:

a. Digital marketing makes it possible to “personalize” marketing offers to individual customers.

b. For this, it needs to source and visualize customer trends at regular intervals using business intelligence tools.

3. Measure marketing effectiveness:

a. A company needs to know if its marketing expense is giving a positive and good Return On Investment (ROI).

b. Business intelligence can provide dashboards, visualization tools, and “what-if” scenario analysis to help companies re-allocate marketing efforts and expenses as required to maximize ROI.

4. Manage competition better:

a. Business intelligence gives up-to-date and in-depth competitor data and the general industry, which marketers can use to benchmark their performance.

b. Companies can change the marketing mix to respond to competitor actions and gain a competitive advantage.

5. Campaign optimization

a. Companies prefer campaigns with higher ROI.

b. Using the analysis function of business intelligence tools can help the marketing team determine which campaign is working better. As this happens in real-time, marketing can modify, replace or delete a marketing campaign as required so that the marketing spend is optimized at all times.

6. Faster reports and better insights

a. Graphical representations of data and analysis can help marketing teams respond faster and better to developments or changes.

b. Business intelligence software helps marketing focus on key business issues rather than administrative tasks.

Here is an example of a unified dashboard for digital marketing channels performance using business intelligence:

Source: www.medium.com

Business Intelligence tools for marketing

Companies need to analyze their marketing requirements to identify and invest in the right business intelligence tools. The tools or software that are implemented should enable integration of data and easy access to this data at any time. Key parameters for choosing the right business intelligence tools for marketing include:

1. Data warehousing capability: Centralize all raw data into a common “storage.”

2. Data pipeline: Use it to move data from multiple touchpoints to the data warehouse.

3. Intuitive dashboards: They can be used to present and visualize data in a simple and clear way.

4. Analysis and reports: Data without analysis is meaningless, and analysis without reports is of no use. An effective business intelligence system for marketing should have a very good analysis and reporting functionality so that decision-makers can respond quickly and ensure that the company’s metrics are on track.

An ideal business intelligence tool for marketing should offer the following key features:

Some of the prominent business intelligence tools in marketing include:

1. Microsoft Dynamics 365 (https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/)

2. Bitrix 24 (https://www.bitrix24.com/tools/crm/)

3. Monday.com (https://monday.com/lp/marketing/bundle/)

4. ClickCease (https://www.clickcease.com/)

5. Quartile (https://go.quartile.com/)

6. SmartSheet (https://www.smartsheet.com/)

Conclusion

A properly designed and up-to-date business intelligence system for marketing helps companies track marketing KPIs such as:

1. Funnel conversion rates

2. Cost per Lead

3. Customer Acquisition Cost

4. Website visits to leads ratio

5. Channel conversion rates

6. Customer retention

There are a few simple steps that a company can follow to choose the right business intelligence software for improving its marketing:

1. Identify the marketing goals.

2. Collect and centralize data from all possible sources.

3. Identify a platform to connect the data.

4. Design dashboards that help visualize and understand insights.

5. Implement the insights to attain the marketing goals.

Business intelligence provides a holistic view of a company’s processes and strategy, making it easier to integrate the marketing function as a critical driver of its business objectives. Companies should use business intelligence smartly to gain a competitive advantage!