Business Intelligence for Marketing - A Shiny New Silver Bullet?

No longer can marketers simply rely on the “Four P’s”. Today’s marketers need to see the big picture. This is why more and more marketers are prioritizing business intelligence initiatives to better understand their customers, measure results, and optimize processes by using data and insight to refine marketing campaigns, while drafting a plan for the future.

There’s good reason for this too. Business intelligence solutions can leverage data from dozens of sources, centralize it, and transform it into something even the least tech-savvy executive can use.

The Case for Business Intelligence

Imagine combining CRM, marketing automation, and Google Analytics into a single platform to better understand the behaviors, demographics, and process through the funnel. Now imagine using this information to tailor your content strategies, enhance your buyer personas, and better predict what will be the most effective marketing.

The case for business intelligence has never been clearer, and even marketers in less ‘tech-savvy’ industries are taking note.

In fact, according to research from the Business Software Education Center, executives are putting top priority on analytics and business intelligence solutions.

According to the C-Suite Software Sentiment Study, when asked which strategic initiatives they are implementing heading into the coming decade, executives saw business intelligence solutions in their top five—sitting behind only cloud, mobility, and digital transformation initiatives.

4 Marketing Benefits of Business Intelligence

If you’re still not sold on business intelligence, know this: Your competitors likely are. Here are four benefits to marketers who use business intelligence.

Centralize Data, Integrate Your Technology

We recently just looked at how diverse the marketing technology stack is, noting that there are tens of thousands of applications used across dozens of categories. Each of these applications generates usable data—but only if you know how to use it.

For too many marketers, trying to track this data across dozens of applications is cause for concern. Trying to combine it is even harder.

Maybe if you can afford someone to compile data, analyze it and present it, you can get something out of it. It’s more likely, however, that you are leaving money on the table. Blind spots are costly, and the shotgun approach to marketing rarely succeeds.

Business intelligence tools can contribute significantly to a fully integrated marketing approach. By bringing data together from your entire MarTech stack, you can use this to convey a unified message, tailor it scientifically, and improve results. Integrated marketing technologies provide customers with consistent messaging across platforms and can make a brand stick out in the mind of a customer, and ultimately be a determining factor in a purchase.

Automate Processing, Reduce Errors

Have you ever made a typo? Of course you have. Now say you are about to embrace some major initiative or present some big change to your boss. He or she is going to expect you have accurate information, and you’re a finger slip away from recommending something that could either harm your credibility or take your company down the wrong path.

On the other hand, you can set up a business intelligence product to grab data from the source, combine it with other information, and present it with a couple clicks. But it gets better.

Present Data More Effectively

Most people process information visually. It’s a reason that people love infographics, and it’s a reason you’ll love using BI software.

Like the dashboard of a car gives the driver a visual of the most important information he needs to keep driving safely and successfully, a business intelligence dashboard provides a marketer with an overview of the progress of the company. Now, you can track what’s going on by looking at a visualization—not a spreadsheet. Now when presenting this great idea, you can show why something works (or will work), rather than trying to explain every detail. There are many different types of visuals you can utilize and heat maps are definitely one of the more effective.

See the Future

It’s awfully hard to look forward if you’re spending all your time living in the past. You already know just how fast the marketing industry moves, and if you’re spending all your time analyzing historical concepts, you might miss something right in front of you.

Not only can a business intelligence solution save you time on the processing and analysis of past data, it can help you see the future. Predictive analytics leverages past trends to present accurate forecasting information. Information about how one prospect acts can inform you how another will act.

Whether you are using it to improve your messaging, buy ads, or to plan your ecommerce demand, predictive analytics will continue to become a bigger part of business intelligence and marketing as a whole.

2020 is Coming: How Clear Is Your Marketing Vision?

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing. Innovations are coming seemingly every day, new technologies are improving small or large facets of your business, and the little guys continue to beat out the old guard. However, you have to be smart. A smart company with a shoestring MarTech budget can run circles around a global player who pumps millions or billions into marketing.

Business intelligence gives marketers the power to combine, track, and utilize data in new ways, and will continue to become a bigger part of the marketing world.

Looking to learn more? Go check out the entire report from the Business Software Education Center and see how smart your website is with our free website analysis.