How modern BI tools overcome the challenges of marketing analytics

One major challenge in marketing analytics is tracking data across multiple systems and channels. With an industry-leading business intelligence tool, you can combine all your marketing analytics within a single platform to easily compare across channels and campaigns.

To stay competitive in today’s fast-moving, ever-changing digital world, a company must have the capability to leverage modern marketing analytics. Not only does this improve the overall decision-making of an organization, but it helps guide customer relationships by offering insight into what a buyer wants and how to deliver that product or service to them effectively.

Business intelligence (BI) tools are the key to making these cognitive leaps because they streamline and organize all of the data points an organization is collecting so that decision-makers can get a macro viewpoint. Think of this as having a helm to steer your giant ship through the murky waters of analytics.

What are marketing analytics and why do they matter?

Marketing analytics is the method of analyzing and measuring the performance of your marketing efforts so you can boost your return on investment. You are trying to capture as many new buyers and leads with as few resources as possible and transform these potential customers into loyal brand ambassadors.

This is critical to modern business. It helps companies understand more about potential customers, including their needs, behavior, preferences, and more. Marketing analytics aid in understanding the customer journey from awareness to purchase.

For example, if you are selling a product that requires people to install it on a computer or device, then you need to know who is using your product and if they have the skills necessary to make the installation. This can help you target ads toward people who are likely to be interested in your product (and avoid wasting money targeting those who aren’t).

Marketing analytics is also essential for companies who want better insight into their own performance so they can improve future campaigns by avoiding mistakes from previous ones. This helps them make decisions that will increase sales while reducing costs associated with producing content, such as expensive campaigns and investments.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data to improve decision-making. It’s a broad term that includes many different tools and techniques. Business intelligence is a subset of analytics and a subset of data science.

Business intelligence involves gathering, cleaning, and storing data in order to make it easier for business users to analyze the information and make better decisions based on those insights. BI tools allow users to visualize their data so they can see patterns or correlations more quickly than in raw spreadsheet form.

BI tools are software applications that allow users to analyze large amounts of data. BI tools gather and analyze information from multiple sources, including structured and unstructured data in different formats. They then display the results in a way that makes them easy to understand for all members of an organization. Common BI tools include dashboards and custom reports that present information to stakeholders to vastly improve decision-making.

How do BI tools improve marketing analytics?

There is no golden ticket to improving marketing analytics. You have to constantly work at staying on the cutting edge of development and theory testing to remain in front of your competition. However, some standard benefits of BI tools are sure to boost your team’s marketing efforts.

Filter out inaccurate data

Inaccuracy of data is a big problem for marketers who don’t use modern BI tools because manually entering data from different sources is time-consuming and can be prone to error. Inaccurate data can lead to incorrect conclusions about which strategies are working best for your business.

It’s also hard for marketers to identify inaccurate data because they don’t have access to all of the information needed to verify it. A robust BI tool with an easy-to-understand dashboard will perform these actions automatically in the background. Solutions can be programmed to filter out data points that do not meet specific criteria and help you avoid making a decision based on erroneous or inaccurate information.

Identify customer trends

The use of BI tools has become increasingly important as businesses have adopted more complex marketing efforts. With the emergence of digital marketing channels and the rise in consumer expectations, marketers need a way to identify trends in their target customers, campaigns, channels, and data.

Results help you understand who your ideal customer is (i.e., what demographics they belong to), what kind of content most resonates with them, which marketing channels they frequently use, and how long it takes you to convert leads into customers. This allows you to cultivate more targeted ad campaigns using popular trends in response to market changes.

Create consistent lead generation criteria

When it comes to lead generation, you need a consistent and streamlined process across all communication channels. To make sure you have the same lead generation criteria in place for all your marketing channels, use BI tools that enable you to easily create and manage lead generation forms.

Whatever your company’s specific needs are, you can undoubtedly find a modern BI tool that can help you create consistent lead generation criteria across multiple teams or departments.

Measure marketing goals and campaign effectiveness

In addition to measuring overall campaign performance, BI tools also allow you to identify which marketing channels are the most effective based on various metrics such as revenue generation and cost per lead. This data can then be used by sales teams and data engineers to adjust current and future campaigns. You will be able to easily demonstrate how much more likely you are to generate leads while keeping costs low, especially compared to the competition.

Test new campaigns at scale

If you’re testing a new product or service, it’s crucial to understand how your target audience reacts to it. How can you know what the conversion rate will be if you don’t test out different marketing strategies?

By using BI tools in your business analytics strategy, you can run multiple A/B tests and collect data on how each campaign affects sales. With this information, you’ll be able to determine which campaigns are working best for your customers and adjust accordingly. All of this can be done on a much smaller scale based on the data collected. This lowers investment costs and removes barriers to innovative marketing campaigns, all because of marketing analytics integration.

Ensure higher levels of security and data integrity

BI tools ensure a higher level of monitoring for security or data integrity. This is particularly important in today’s era when organizations are required to ensure that they have adequate controls over the processing of personal data under their control.

Organizations need to be able to demonstrate that they have implemented appropriate technical and organizational measures, such as audit trails and encryption processes, to protect personal information from unauthorized access, destruction, or disclosure.

With modern BI tools, it’s simple to create reports that show how employees are accessing sensitive data files or performing specific activities on those files. This includes any marketing campaign based on current analytical data points.

The most important factor: combining marketing channels and campaigns

While there are many benefits to integrating a modern BI tool into your marketing efforts, the one factor sure to save you time and money is combining all of your different channels and campaigns into a single location.

BI tools reduce the time you spend tracking and analyzing data. Instead of having to log in to multiple systems to view analytics, you can rely on a single software that combines data from all channels.

For example, if you’re working on an email marketing campaign, a BI tool would allow you to create consistent lead generation criteria for each channel in the campaign, including details like subject line length, call-to-action text, and button color. This consistency makes it easier for marketers to track metrics such as open rates or clickthroughs.

The ability to evaluate certain variables across multiple campaigns offers marketers greater insight into which strategies work best for their target audience—all while maintaining the security and integrity of sensitive information.

Having this data at your fingertips instead of hunting through numerous locations vastly improves the decision-making process and enables your company to remain more agile in the marketplace.

Staying competitive requires modern BI tools

A number of new technologies are available to the modern marketer who wants to master marketing analytics. These tools provide the ability to create actionable insights from data in ways that weren’t previously possible. BI tools can also help businesses increase sales and improve customer retention by providing a better experience for them.

The best way to stay competitive in today’s demanding marketplace is to integrate BI tools into your organization’s marketing analytics efforts.