June 23, 2023
In the face of fierce competition, companies should put aside reactive efforts and assumption-based marketing tactics and start using data to develop informed customer-centered marketing plans. Business intelligence comes into play to provide the required data-driven insights essential for guiding the marketing process and building a winning marketing strategy.
Business analytics is a solid foundation for many marketing activities. Let's have a look at how business intelligence is applied in the marketing field.
Companies can target the right segments with the right message at the right time by collecting and processing customer demographic information, preferred product lines and services, interaction patterns, and purchasing habits from multiple channels, including the company’s website, corporate applications, social media platforms, and third-party sources.
The marketing team can track customer lifetime value to focus their efforts more effectively, target the most profitable customers, and identify new audiences worth engaging with.
Marketing BI adopters can determine the best-performing marketing tactics to focus on the most effective methods, abandon or revamp marketing strategies, optimize marketing budget allocation, and identify cost-saving opportunities.
Using BI, marketers can get a 360-degree customer view with data from different heterogeneous sources and use it to personalize multi-channel interactions and marketing activities, allocate marketing efforts more wisely, and create customer journey maps.
Marketers can gain a deep understanding of the target market, the most profitable customer segments, a potential customer base, customer feedback and sentiment, and competitor offering and let the product management team know about the spotted gaps in the market.
Marketing specialists can easily research market trends and competitor marketing campaigns and conduct an advanced analysis of a competitor’s audience. Using this information, they can assess competitors’ marketing practices for specific channels, find new customer segments, and adjust current marketing efforts (change pricing, increase marketing spend for a particular channel, target different demographics, etc.).
Companies can use disparate data on marketing performance (website visits, goal completion rates, leads, conversion rates, and ROI) to create new campaigns, merchandising activities, and loyalty programs or refine the existing ones.
Here are the most commonly used data sources in marketing that are worth integrating with marketing BI:
CRM software
Customer service software
Email marketing software
Web analytics and paid ads platforms
SEO tools
Mobile marketing software
Social media analytics platforms
Market research platforms
Key integration options
The customer is a leading digital media company that uses its marketing platform to promote its clients via organic and paid promotion methods. The company decided to revamp its data analysis and visualization processes to monitor and predict ad campaigns’ progress more effectively. Itransition developed a set of analytics optimization solutions equipped with dynamic dashboards and customizable campaign-specific benchmarks, which has helped the customer make realistic forecasts and real-time predictions, as well as monitor advertising campaign performance through user-friendly dashboards. With a newly implemented analyticбs solution, the customer managed to improve benchmark achievement by 8x and reduce overspending by 7x.
improved benchmark achievement
Traditionally, full-scale business intelligence solutions for marketing are built with the following software:
Here, we describe top business intelligence tools for marketing, each among leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and The Forrester Wave reports.
Power BI Desktop
free
Power BI Pro
$9.99 per user/month
Power BI Premium
$20 per user/month or $4,995 per capacity/month with an annual subscription
Free trial
2-month free trial for each new user
The BI software market is mature, so while choosing an optimal marketing BI platform, companies can be selective and rely on their unique needs and goals. Modern BI platforms support a full analytics workflow and are easy to use due to self-service BI capabilities and augmented analytics.
Here is the list of critical capabilities you should look for in a BI solution for marketing:
BI tools help marketing specialists measure promotion effectiveness and identify strategies that work best, as well as areas of improvement for low-selling products, and effectively execute their upsell and cross-sell campaigns.
Comprehensive omnichannel customer insights delivered by BI software empower marketing teams to target the audience with tailored offerings, personalize every customer interaction, and deliver the best customer experience to increase customer loyalty and CLV.
BI software enables effective customer segmentation and accurate customer lifetime value tracking, helping marketers to focus on the most profitable customers, timely identify new customer segments, and retain high-value customers.
BI tools can identify how advertisements, promotional activities, and executed marketing campaigns influence the bottom line. This way, marketing teams can implement the most effective marketing activities and identify areas where marketing teams can cut costs.
By automating manual, repetitive tasks (data inputting and cleansing, report generation), marketers can prevent inefficiency bottlenecks, prioritize more critical business workflows, and have more time for high-priority activities.
Integrated data security and governance capabilities help marketing specialists identify where business data resides, track data workflows, and control data access according to user roles to prevent data loss, manipulation, and sensitive data exposure.
While BI promises multiple tangible benefits for marketing, many companies that have invested in BI are still far from leveraging its full potential. Let’s see what are some common BI adoption stumbling blocks and how to make BI software work for your marketing department.
Data used for marketing analytics comes from multiple heterogeneous systems, which can result in duplicates, errors, and inconsistencies. Poor data quality complicates and slows down the analytics process and compromises the validity of results.
A comprehensive and well-setup data quality management process helps mitigate all erroneous data risks. You can:
Data democratization driven by BI self-service capabilities can create risks of sensitive data exposure, uncontrolled software deployments, high licensing costs, and inaccurate analytics insights.
Before implementing self-service BI software, establish a solid data governance strategy. Also, to minimize data security issues and ensure the analytics insight are viable, consider implementing the following:
After BI implementation, end users can continue using familiar tools, making new functionality and improved data capabilities useless.
To improve the chances of BI marketing initiatives for success, you should develop a change management strategy, which includes the following:
Data sources – their number, integration flexibility, deployment environment
Data for analysis – its volume, refresh frequency, structure, variability, and format
Initial data quality and data quality requirements
Data storage layer complexity, particularly the availability of an enterprise data warehouse, data marts, and complementary data storage
Data analytics complexity, including the number of entities, data flow complexity, ML and AI tools, analytics streaming, and real-time data analytics
Data visualization and reporting requirements, including embedded reporting, self-service BI, and custom visualization
Mobile support
Data security and compliance requirements
Since marketing has become increasingly data-driven, BI is a staple for marketing specialists. Companies use analytics insights derived from BI software across industries to streamline the decision-making process in marketing, design better marketing campaigns, target the right audience, spot marketing trends, increase customer loyalty, and generate high ROI. Still, BI implementation is wrought with numerous challenges, so if you want to get an effective marketing BI solution that makes a difference from the get-to, consider hiring BI experts like Itransition for expert assistance.