/ How to use Business Intelligence (BI) for Marketing

How to use Business Intelligence (BI) for Marketing

Business intelligence for marketing software example

With so many options on the table nowadays, the market has become consumer-centric. Customer expectations are on the rise across B2B and B2C industries. So, customization is now a must-have, no longer a nice to have. Competitiveness is increasing all the time, and that’s where data can help you remain ahead.

From selecting the correct online service for marketing strategies to targeting online clients with customized or tailored discounts, data continues to affect marketing and sales strategy decision-making. Marketers can use actionable data to optimize campaigns and create the maximum conversions. This data provides information around consumer purchases as well as sales figures for various sorts of items utilizing business intelligence for marketing operations.

What is business intelligence?

Through reporting and data visualization, business intelligence (BI) is a collection of technology-driven processes that extract meaningful and critical information from a significant amount of external and internal data. These insights can aid various organizational functions such as marketing and sales in making more informed decisions and taking more strategic actions.

Data management, analytics, and reporting technologies, as well as diverse approaches for analyzing and presenting data on dashboards, are all part of BI.

BI for marketing provides the following benefits:

  • Examine audience interaction patterns, pain points, and purchase habits in order to reach the right individual at the right time with the appropriate offer.
  • Monitor the performance of marketing efforts in real-time and maximize data usage to get the best results.
  • Data reporting and processing automation allow marketers to view the big picture rather than spending their time on mundane tasks, giving them a great tool for useful insight discovery.

Let’s look more closely at how BI works in marketing.

What is business intelligence in marketing?

In the marketing realm, BI uses customer data and related analysis techniques to adjust campaigns to target audiences. The gathered information provides insights in performance, behavior, and demographics. This information is then used to tailor strategies and build campaigns to improve return on investment (ROI) and conversions. 

Why does BI in marketing matter? It provides valuable information around target audiences which helps organizations better target these audiences to meet their needs, preferences, and expectations. Without this information, organizations only have a vague idea of who they’re reaching out to and can’t properly adjust strategies or segment audiences. BI marketing information can be used out of the marketing department as well in product development, customer support, and branding. 

Benefits of business intelligence for marketing

Digital marketers can use business intelligence to gain in-depth insights into their customers’ needs, preferences, and attitudes. This information can be used by businesses to design more efficient marketing strategies that target specific target audiences and produce remarkable outcomes. Let’s take a closer look at the marketing benefits of BI.

Increased effectiveness and improved customer experience

Marketing managers all over the world are competing on the basis of customer experience, therefore it’s critical to understand customers’ behavior, needs, and desires. BI for digital marketing provides firms with customer knowledge, allowing them to segment customers and attract the right prospects to fulfill their goals.

BI solutions aid in the removal of bottlenecks, the automation of jobs, the improvement of processes, the prioritization of workflows, and increased productivity. Business intelligence for marketing improves sales, customer experience, day-to-day performance, and efficiency in this way.

Marketing decisions and goals based on data

Companies can use BI technologies to improve their marketing function and visibility of sales data, allowing them to fine-tune marketing efforts. Business intelligence can assist in asking the correct questions of a large dataset and defining the most relevant KPIs for a given business goal.

Furthermore, BI allows for better decision-making. Every decision you make as a business owner can have a significant influence on your bottom line. That’s why having data to back up your decisions is so critical. Business intelligence can make the information needed to make informed decisions readily available to important stakeholders.

Targeted demographics

Many businesses market to customers through different channels, and BI allows firms to analyze all the data from these separate channels, allowing them to draw actionable conclusions that can inform their marketing plan. Marketers should send advertisements to the appropriate individuals at the right time through the right channels to get results but doing so necessitates a detailed analysis of demographic data.

Marketers can make mistakes about who their target audience is, which is why some marketing strategies fail. Additionally, if marketers are unaware of relevant KPIs, their marketing campaigns may not align with the strategic direction of the company as a whole. As a result, money can be wasted by conducting similar campaigns after campaigns that aren’t making an impact.

Consumer data can be gathered from a variety of sources and presented in a dashboard view that includes demographics, audience pain points, preferred product lines, interaction models, purchasing habits, and more.

Marketing campaigns that work

Marketing business intelligence solutions may track and analyze campaign results in real-time as well as compare them to historical patterns.

This comparison research can help optimize marketing costs and, if necessary, filter promotional activities that produce the best outcomes. Businesses can efficiently implement their cross-sell and best-sell efforts when they are backed up by marketing data while decelerating projects that aren’t generating as much revenue as expected.

Following a thorough review, procedures can be improved or eliminated, allowing business owners to reduce resource waste and improve performance. Simultaneously, forecasting future opportunities can assist businesses in fine-tuning their manufacturing and marketing operations, resulting in improved revenue and profit.

Quality insights and a quick reporting process

Many firms nowadays rely on current data to produce actionable insights and derive value from it. Large data volumes may also slow down reporting and decision-making, which is important in an ever-changing market. This may result in business being lost to more efficient competitors.

Automated business intelligence dashboards, on the other hand, allow for faster data processing and the extraction of useful insights. Companies can minimize the time it takes to generate reports from days to hours. Marketing teams can analyze data visualizations on their dashboard in the blink of an eye and offer corrective or reactive measures to optimize advertising and strengthen their market position.

Furthermore, business intelligence (BI) and analytics software enable management to receive notifications when patterns begin to deteriorate or when crucial data needs to be examined, allowing issues to be solved before they become disastrous.

Predictive and prescriptive analysis

Predictive and prescriptive analysis is another benefit of BI in marketing. Predictive analysis uses data and machine learning to analyze trends and predict outcomes in the future. It can also help to forecast customer behavior and buying trends. The related data can be integrated into BI tools to tailor strategies, campaigns, and initiatives for the greatest impact.

Prescriptive analysis takes those predicted outcomes to generate suggestions on what strategies will positively affect those outcomes. In other words, it tells you what steps to take to make those outcomes work in the favor of your marketing strategy and campaigns. It supports informed decision-making around your channels, tactics, and methods to reach your target audience and reach your goals. 

Improved reporting

It’s great to have data but it’s not effective if reporting isn’t included in the equation. Reporting can help you uncover trends and insights to improve the results of your strategy and campaigns. However, when you have multiple data sources and lots of data to work with, it can be difficult to generate accessible reports. 

BI, especially automated BI, can help improve reporting in marketing. Dashboards provide an intuitive way to visualize and review data. Stakeholders can easily generate reports and track KPIs that matter to them. BI dashboards can also be easily tweaked to monitor performance and metrics based on current strategies and tactics. 

Segmentation

When you’re working with target audiences, it’s important to divide them into categories based on factors such as demographics, geographics, values, interests, and behaviors. This process is referred to as segmentation. 

Without segmentation, organizations are essentially guessing on where an audience member falls into specific groups. That leaves a lot of room for error. BI makes all the difference by giving accurate information about a target audience member’s demographic information, interests, buying behaviors, expectations, challenges, and more for precise attribution. 

Put yourself ahead of the pack

Businesses can also utilize BI reporting to learn more about their competitors and the industry as a whole. Companies may be able to measure and compare their competitors’ performance using third-party data. They can then alter their efforts to outperform the competition by changing pricing, increasing marketing expenditure in a neglected channel, or focusing on other demographics, for example.

In a variety of ways, businesses can use BI to achieve a competitive advantage. They can examine competitors’ marketing tactics for certain channels, like email, to determine if their own marketing could be enhanced, or compare specific data, like website traffic or even social media engagement. 

Digital marketing organizations can use business data to adapt to consumer needs, increase sales indicators, and optimize focused campaigns. Many firms are investing extensively in training end users on BI technologies to support data-driven decision-making.

Utilizing business intelligence in marketing is crucial for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced environment. By harnessing actionable data, companies can tailor strategies to meet customer needs and optimize campaign performance. Those who effectively leverage BI will not only meet rising consumer expectations but also drive sustainable growth and innovation in the marketplace.

Check out some related resources:

BI Dashboards: Building and Designing Best Practices

Guide: Business Intelligence and Tools for Small Businesses

Cloud Integration: What It Is and How It Works

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