How to Leverage Business Intelligence for Marketing

In today’s reality, the market has become consumer-centric — you need to get people interested in your product or service by offering a custom approach because there are too many options on the table. Competitiveness is growing day by day, and that’s when smart use of business data can help you stay ahead.

Data continues to influence marketing and sales strategies’ decision-making, from choosing the right social media platforms for digital marketing campaigns to targeting online customers with special or personalized promotions. Business intelligence for marketing processes allows for the use of actionable data to track customer purchases and view sales statistics for various types of products to optimize campaigns and drive the most conversions. How would the marketing industry use business intelligence? Let’s find out the details below.

BI in marketing includes a combination of data analytics, data management, and reporting tools, along with various methodologies for analyzing and visualizing data in dashboards.

Business intelligence for marketing helps to:

• Analyze audiences’ pain points, interaction patterns, and purchasing habits to target the right person at the right moment with the right promotion
• Track marketing campaigns’ performance in real-time and optimize data usage to maximize performance 
• Data processing and reporting automation allows to see the big picture and not spend marketing teams’ time on routine, instead of providing them with a powerful tool for valuable insight discovery

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits that business intelligence in marketing brings to companies.

Benefits of Business Intelligence for Marketing 

Business intelligence for digital marketing helps specialists obtain in-depth insights into a client’s wishes, preferences, and attitudes with minimum marketing efforts. Businesses can use these insights to create more efficient marketing campaigns for existing and potential customers and generate outstanding results. Let’s dive deep into the BI benefits for marketing.

Enhanced Customer Experience and Increased Effectiveness

Marketing professionals 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 them 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, business intelligence tools enable 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 marketing 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 consumer data from any sources available and present a dashboard view of their demographic stats, audiences’ pain points, purchasing habits, preferred product lines, interaction models, and more. 

Optimized Marketing Campaigns

Business intelligence tools for marketing can track and analyze organization campaigns’ performance in real-time and even compare them against sales history data and behavioral patterns of customers.

This comparative analysis offers the benefit of optimizing marketing budgets and, if needed, funneling promotional activities that show the highest results. Being backed up by marketing data allows businesses to effectively execute their best-sell and cross-sell campaigns while slowing down projects that don’t generate as much income as predicted. 

After a thorough analysis, the processes can be either enhanced or eliminated, which will allow business owners to decrease resource waste and optimize performance. Simultaneously, predicting future opportunities can help organizations adjust production and marketing processes, leading to increased revenue and profit.

Rapid Reporting Process and Quality Insights

Today, many organizations depend on up-to-date data to generate actionable insights to gain value from the data. Large data volumes can slow down the reporting and decision-making processes, which can be critical for an ever-evolving market. This can lead to even losing business to more efficient competitors.

As an alternative, automated business intelligence dashboards provide rapid data processing and derive valuable insights more efficiently. Companies can reduce report generation time from days to a matter of hours. In the twinkling of an eye, marketing departments can view data visualizations on their dashboards and recommend corrective or reactive strategies to optimize campaigns and strengthen their position on the market.

Moreover, business intelligence and marketing analytics software allow to set up notifications for management when trends begin to drop or there is some important data to look through, so issues can be addressed before they become catastrophic.

NIX Use Case of Business Intelligence in Marketing

The client owns a supermarket chain that sells groceries and homegoods. The client was interested in receiving detailed information about its marketing activities’ effectiveness, such as e-mail distribution of discount coupons to members of the loyalty program.

NIX used the business intelligence tool Looker, which allowed the creation of three dashboards with all the necessary information for rapid reporting, market insights, demographic analysis, and efficient audience profiling. 

1. Overview dashboard contains the main financial indicators and reflects the general dynamics — total sales for the selected period, sales by the state for the current year, sales by product category, average bill value over time, comparison of the projected value with the actual value, and much more. Top management can make decisions based on up-to-date information, track the overall dynamics of the company, and understand which product line brings the most revenue, and filter customer interaction data for a certain period of time to analyze each of the periods individually.
2. The marketing dashboard contains the results of marketing activities such as the top 10 products sold, the number of campaigns over time and by type, coupon usage, and more. Marketing teams can analyze data for the best and lowest sellers and define the most desired suppliers. Moreover, marketing dashboards show how effective different types of campaigns for specific groups are, which allows for optimizing or eliminating unprofitable campaigns.
3. A demographic dashboard with consumer demographic analysis shows profit distribution by different categories of people based on age, income level, marital status, presence of children, and more. Top management, marketing, and supermarket owners can see sales analysis by customer demographics to understand the target audience and effectiveness of sending coupons to different groups of customers.

By implementing business intelligence for marketing, the client enhanced the effectiveness of coupon sending, better understood the target audience, and optimized overall marketing campaigns, which led to higher profits and improved customer experience.

Summary

Business intelligence for digital marketing helps businesses adjust to customer needs, improve sales indications, and optimize targeted campaigns. Business intelligence is an essential set of technology and processes, and many companies are investing heavily in training end-users on business intelligence tools to encourage data-driven decision-making.

NIX can help you boost your company with business intelligence and lead marketing initiatives to the next level with business insights.