We've seen this time and again. Broaching the idea of purchasing business intelligence tools to your marketing department, likely gets you yawns or head-scratching as a response.
The saddening stats bear this out. In one survey conducted by MiQ among marketers in the US and the UK, it was found out that 43% of them consider the cost of advanced data science as the biggest challenge to investing in it. Another 39% say interpreting data was a roadblock, while 38% believe they simply lack the resources to analyse volumes and volumes of data.
43% of marketers cite cost of advanced data science as the biggest challenge to investing in it.
If anything, what these stats reveal is a general lack of understanding of how business intelligence can tangibly drive marketing results. And certainly, the fear among marketers is valid—Where to start? Which operations of the marketing should I prioritise? How long will it take before I see real results?
But there’s also the rub: without the tools to help them understand customer habits and attitudes and pinpoint their preferences, how can they even execute, less optimise, campaigns that generate the best results for their business?
Why do marketers need business intelligence? It provides accurate insights for better decision-making and optimisation.
To help marketers fully understand the role of business intelligence in an organisation, we’ve rounded up the top three benefits that clearly illustrate how analytics can turn prospects into your lifetime customers.
Let’s dive in!
1. Targeted Demographics and Better Audience Profiling
A number of marketing campaigns fail for one reason: marketers have only the vaguest idea of who they are targeting and why. And here’s the more frustrating thing: they burn money on running campaign after campaign without even knowing the KPIs they’re aiming for.
It’s essentially putting all your efforts into a hamster wheel and getting nowhere.
See, for your marketing initiatives to bring about results, your campaigns should be able to send your message to the right people at the right time using the right channels. But to do so means getting your hands on volumes of demographic data—your audiences’ pain points, interaction patterns, purchasing habits, buying capacity, among others.
This is where business intelligence comes in. Because it allows you to organise data into multi-channel stream, it thus gives you the power to efficiently build strategies around these fine data points and imagine useful conclusions for your campaigns.
2. Optimised Marketing Campaigns
Ever wondered which of your marketing campaigns is driving the most leads for your business? Then taking to an analytics dashboard won’t hurt. Using a business intelligence tool, you can track and analyse performance of your campaigns in real-time and even compare it against your historical patterns.
This comparative analysis gives you then the benefit of deciding how to shuffle your marketing budgets and funnel it to promotional activities that give you the highest returns on investment. Moreover, having a good handle on your marketing data also gives you the opportunity to effectively execute your up-sell and cross-sell campaigns, while soft-pedalling projects that don’t generate as much income as expected.
Just consider for instance how you can promote slow-moving merchandise when you have full visibility into your customer purchasing habits; Or how you can re-market overstocked items with price points that instantly hook potential buyers (you can do this if you have insights with how much they spend on e-baskets, for example).
With business intelligence, you’re empowered with the option to optimise your customer acquisition efforts and easing your prospects down the sales funnel.
3. Speedier Reporting Process and Quality Insights
It’s important for businesses today to collect as much data as they can about their target market. But doing so doesn’t have to mean slower reporting process and poor insights.
A good business intelligence dashboards precisely addresses this.
Right off the bat, marketing departments can simply view data visualisations on their dashboard (no more complicated rows and columns that make your reports more prone to errors!) and recommend remedial or reactive strategies that can help strengthen your company’s position in the market.
With a speedier reporting process, marketing professionals won’t also have to waste time reconciling data streams and adjusting calculations as needed.
Business intelligence will allow them to drive more focus on enterprise-affecting issues of the company, rather than getting saddled with administrative duties—time that would have otherwise been spent on enhancing customer satisfaction and building strategies for market expansion.
Marketing data is the gift that will keep on giving, to your marketing team's operation and your business!
A trove of data brings about a trove of business opportunities—but only if your marketing department knows how to use it to their advantage.
Poor forecast? Snail-paced reporting process? Error-prone insights? You can definitely eliminate them with business intelligence dashboards that allows you to make sense of your data in an instant. It’s your tool to taking charge of your business better. It’s your tool to enhancing your competitive advantage.
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