With Business Intelligence for Marketing, your company gets a better view of each customer to make their marketing efforts more successful. In this web-based seminar, you will learn how to use Microsoft’s integrated analytic applications to gain insight into your business to deliver better customer experiences, increase operational efficiencies and improve financial performance.
Business Intelligence for Marketing answers the most important questions facing today’s marketer. This concise, focused book answers these questions by drawing on the author’s expertise in business intelligence, research, planning, analysis, measurement, and evaluation of marketing investments.
Benefits of using BI in digital marketing
BI provides the data-driven insights businesses need to guide the marketing process. BI tools can help companies understand their audience, find trends in customer behavior, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts across all channels, and reveal insights on competitors. Let’s examine how companies can use BI to accomplish these goals in more detail.
Know your audience
If a business doesn’t know who its customers are, its marketing efforts are doomed. Organizations gather customer data through many channels, including their own websites, messages and comments on social media posts, and third-party data sources. Understanding information regarding customer demographics can mean the difference between success and failure for a marketing campaign.
Enterprises can use BI tools to develop a picture of their customers across all marketing channels to reveal who they should target. For instance, a company could use BI to view data on engagements across various social media platforms to show who responds well to its social media marketing efforts, then adjust its marketing to better target that audience. A BI tool could also regularly track customer lifetime value so the enterprise can ensure it’s focusing its marketing efforts on the most profitable customers and identify new groups that are worth engaging with.
Find trends in customer behavior
Marketing campaigns need to address buyers with personalized offerings. According to an Accenture report, almost a third of customers “expect the companies with which they engage to know more about them.” BI tools help organizations see how to tailor marketing to meet customers’ needs.
At the point of purchase, for example, some customers might look for product details on the company’s website, while others seek out on peer reviews on social media or rely on email campaigns. A pie chart on the distribution of customers’ preferred channels or a heat map of review sources helps enterprises understand how customers interact with products and what factors entice them to make a purchase. By gaining such insights, marketers can run relevant, timely, and personalized campaigns that reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lead to better customer engagement.
Measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts
Companies spend billions in marketing — in 2017, Alphabet spent $2.4 billion on advertising, while Procter and Gamble spent $4.3 billion. But how can they know whether these expenditures provide a positive return on investment (ROI)?
BI reports, supported by dashboards and visualization tools, can help monitor marketing efforts and measure their effectiveness. Continuous tracking and reporting allows companies to quickly withdraw or realign their marketing strategies as indicated.
Enterprises can use BI tools to track and compare KPIs that give insight into whether marketing efforts are generating higher returns, such as:
- Website traffic-to-leads ratio
- Marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL) ratio
- Conversion rates from multiple channels, such as landing pages and emails
- Email unsubscribe rate
- Returning visitors to the website
- Funnel conversion rates
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- CAC
- Customer retention
Take Netflix — in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company’s marketing spend jumped by 57% year-over-year, while its revenues rose by 27%. An analysis attributes the discrepancy to escalating CAC. Winning a new customer in the U.S. costs Netflix four times more than it used to, as the company finds itself running out of new households to sell to. Netflix could use BI tools to surface this information, then retool their marketing efforts by, for example, exploring underutilized channels or focusing on less saturated markets to reduce CAC.
Enhanced Customer Experience and Increased Effectiveness
Marketing managers worldwide are competing based on customer experience, and it becomes crucial to know customers’ behavior, needs, and wants. Business intelligence for digital marketing empowers businesses with customer insight to divide customers into segments and attract the right type of prospects to meet the company’s target numbers.
BI tools help release bottlenecks, automate tasks, improve processes, prioritize workflows, and enhance productivity. This way business intelligence for marketing brings a significant improvement in sales, customer experience, day-to-day efficiency and performance.
Data-driven Marketing Goals and Decisions
BI tools can help companies boost their marketing function and enhance sales information visibility, thereby fine-tuning marketing campaigns. Business intelligence can help pose the right questions to a large dataset and easily define KPIs most relevant to a current business goal. Moreover, BI enables better decision-making. When you run a business, every choice can have a big impact on your bottom line. That’s why it’s so important to have data to back up your decision-making. Business intelligence can provide the data for making smart decisions easily accessible to key stakeholders.
Targeted Demographics
Business intelligence for marketing allows for organizing data into a multi-channel stream, giving businesses the power to efficiently build marketing strategies and come to useful conclusions. Marketers should send campaigns to the right people at the right time using the right channels to actually bring results, but to do so means analyzing demographic data thoroughly. Sometimes marketing campaigns fail only for one reason: marketers can be mistaken in what the targeted audience is. Thus, this can lead to wasting funds on running uniformed campaign after campaign without even understanding the KPIs they’re aiming for. Robust BI solutions can collect all sorts of data about consumers from any sources available and present a dashboard view about their demographic stats, audiences’ pain points, purchasing habits, preferred product lines, interaction models, and more.
Business Intelligence in Marketing
How does business intelligence play an important role in all marketing activities? Here are a few of its capabilities:
- Pose the right marketing question
With the massive data volumes being generated by businesses, sifting through the data and finding actionable insights can be a major challenge. BI tools can help in posing the right questions to the enormous dataset and define the BI metrics and KPIs that are most relevant to your business goal. Here’s a case study of the mobile entertainment company, Crowd Media that successfully used business intelligence in sales and marketing to improve its overall marketing efficiency through faster reactions to industry changes and efficient tracking through the right metrics.
- Define and target the right demographics
The success of any marketing campaign depends on the ability to send the right message at the right time to the right consumer. Among the major benefits of business intelligence, effective BI solutions can collect demographic information about consumers from a variety of online platforms and present a unified view about their age group, buying patterns, preferred product lines, and more.
Food delivery company, Deliveroo was successful in implementing business intelligence to provide valuable customer data to every business user in the company and make smarter decisions with deeper insights.
- Simplify marketing and business reports
Business enterprises that depend on real-time data collected from varied sources need to generate real-time actionable insights to gain value from the data. Marketing teams spending days going through non-standardized business reports are likely to lose business to their more-efficient competitors. This was a challenge for online gaming company, NetBet that was spending more time deriving business sense from disparate data formats collected from incompatible sources. By implementing business intelligence in sales and marketing, this company reduced report generation time from days to a matter of hours, thus increasing their customer retention rate.
Conclusion
Learn to harness the power of business intelligence to make more effective marketing decisions. This book is designed for analytical marketers who are tasked with gathering information on the competition, market segmentation, market share, market size, pricing, and promotional analysis of an existing or new product or service.