Marketing Business Intelligence Tools is the only client relationship management solution designed for marketing, sales, and customer service organizations. It offers increased revenue through improved client retention, accurate demand forecasts, efficient cross selling, efficient lead generation using advanced predictive analytics, efficient channel management using multiple channel coordination with suppliers or partners.
Marketing Business Intelligence Tools for Excel is a collection of tools built by sales, marketing, and analytics teams at Microsoft. These tools enable you to perform market sizing and forecasting, competitor analysis, price sensitivity analysis, and create visual representations of your data in one central location. This toolkit helps you gain insights from your company’s data quickly and with minimal effort. It is now available with the purchase of the Department and Small Business versions of Microsoft Office 365.
MixPanel
MixPanel is a point solution for product analytics. It provides reports on the performance of your product’s features, user conversions and retention, cohort behavior and more. You can also break down that data by device and platform to get more granular insights and create custom dashboards around your KPIs.
These reports help companies understand their users’ experiences and improve upon them in order to increase retention.
Klipfolio
Klipfolio is a cloud-based reporting app that can be used for deepening your understanding of any area of your business. It can be used for data visualization, report building and KPI tracking.
Klipfolio has over 300 integrations and can connect to additional tools through APIs.
DataBox
Databox is a macro solution that can be used to analyze the results of your marketing and sales efforts and your company-wide strategies. The platform pulls your companies data from across your tech stack into a single location for easier analysis. In doing so, it can also calculate cross-platform metrics, like conversion rates, for you.
DataBox is most well-known for its easy-to-use data visualization capabilities. Its dashboards are easy to create and customize for users without design or coding experience, and it has many easy-to-activate integrations that come with hundreds of pre-built custom reports.
Looker
Looker is an advanced business intelligence solution that can be used for everything from marketing reporting to customer 360s to supply chain management. It offers pre-built data visualizations or users can create custom visualization depending on their needs.
Looker also has its own data modeling language that enables users to build custom models or leverage pre-built ones.
Calendar
Calendar offers productivity analytics. It has a number of features designed to analyze how your team’s time is spent. By tracking your moment-to-moment activities on a daily basis, you can identify key areas in which your schedule could be improved.
As important as it is to have your marketing analytics at your fingertips, knowing how you use your time is just as important for maximizing marketing output. Calendar’s clear and simple reporting tools give you helpful reports on what your agenda looks like and what you can do to make it better.
Raven Tools
Raven Tools offers SEO analysis, social media engagement, funnel performance tracking, and competitor comparison. Whether it’s big-picture analyses, like domain authority, or small-scale comparisons of site functionality, Raven Tools lets you stay on top of how you’re faring in competitive spaces. Additionally, the drag-and-drop editor and report generator make creating custom, professional-grade marketing reports easier.
Klipfolio
As important as it is for reporting tools to effectively take in and analyze data, they also need to produce readable reports. Klipfolio is great for making sure your reports can be read and accessed with ease across various technologies as well as via the tool’s dashboard that update in real-time.
Additionally, Klipfolio allows you to offer access to your reports through Slack, email, or custom links, and it enables you to sync your dashboards in real-time across multiple devices such as smartphones, web browsers, and TV screens. Having the ability to efficiently pull up your analytics dashboard at any time, via any device, makes actions like on-the-go reporting, team collaboration, and remote work simple.
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.
Get ahead of the competition
Enterprises can also use BI reporting to gain insights regarding competitors and their industry at large. With third-party data, companies may be able to measure their competitors’ performance and benchmark that against their own. They can then adjust their efforts to beat the competition by, for instance, changing pricing, increasing marketing spend in a neglected channel, or targeting different demographics.
Companies can use BI to gain a competitive advantage in many ways. They can compare specific metrics, such as website traffic or social media engagement for newly launched products, or assess competitors’ marketing practices for specific channels, such as email, to see if their own marketing could be improved.
Conclusion
Marketing Business Intelligence Tools is a comprehensive, practical guide to identifying and leveraging marketing performance data for strategic advantage. The book provides a road map with the right solution at every turn – from problem definition, to data acquisition, management and presentation. Marketing Business Intelligence Tools will help you analyze your data, perform analysis that enables action taking, and gauge measurement effectiveness–all critical activities required for creating a successful marketing program.