When Mr. Richard Miller Devens first used the term “Business Intelligence” in his book Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes in 1865, he probably may not have predicted how the concept would explode into the behemoth industry that it is today. Although the idea of Business Intelligence or BI predates the age of computers, it was this technological development that propelled BI to the forefront of business strategies. With a global market valued at $20.516 billion in 2020 alone, it is evident that businesses everywhere, whether giant conglomerations or innovative SMEs, see the value of leveraging data to make better decisions and map out better corporate strategic routes.
So what exactly is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is an umbrella term that encompasses all the strategies and technologies, such as, analytics, data mining, data marketing, and tools that support data transformation, to help organizations make data-driven decisions.
With internet technology inundating humanity with mind-boggling amounts of data (estimates of data created per day is at 1.145 trillion MB) and 60% of the world’s population (4.66 billion) actively using the internet, it is no wonder that BI today is indispensable. Without BI tools and strategies, such as Operational Intelligence, Open-Source BI, and Ad Hoc Analysis, any organization will find it impossible to process enormous amounts of data in real time. In this article, we will explore the many ways that businesses use BI tools specifically for marketing purposes.
How businesses can leverage BI tools in marketing
#1. Identifying the target audience
Being everything every time to everyone is a guaranteed strategy for failure. It is easy for a business to work its staff to the brink of resignation and waste an enormous amount of money and time without even hitting a single target. Spreading one’s resources too thinly is never a good idea in any business case.
BI tools can help you narrow down your audience so you can focus on the most relevant market for your business. For instance, you can leverage BI to determine which demographic responds the most to your marketing efforts. One example of a BI tool that can help you identify your customer is Sprout Social. With features like Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis, Sprout Social deep dives into your company’s customer engagement and assesses which interactions produce the most bang for your buck.
#2. Understanding customer behavior
Without understanding the needs and preferences of your target market, you will never be able to connect to them in a meaningful way. And if what you have on offer has no relevance to them, you can forget ever hitting your sales and marketing targets. BI tools are leveraged by many businesses to gain insights into what drives their customers, how they make decisions, what factors attract them to a product or service, as well as find out what will keep them coming back.
In addition, knowing what makes your customers tick will help you predict behavior patterns that will help create customized marketing campaigns. A BI tool that can help you with this is MixPanel, a behavioral analytics platform for web and mobile. One clever feature that MixPanel has is the identification of at-risk customers. It then sends them timely messages to recapture their business. In addition, it can also track and analyze cohort behavior to help you develop more cost-effective marketing strategies.
#3. Measuring effectiveness of marketing efforts
What gets measured gets done is indeed a truism. However, it still holds a lot of water today.
Without diligent monitoring and attribution, any marketing effort is as useless as microfiche in a growth company. If you want to see your business stand out from the crowd, tap BI tools that will help track and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing activities in delivering ROI.
Heap Analytics can be one of the BI tools that can help you measure performance. Like other event-based tools, it provides an interface that can gather your events and another interface to analyze those events. The advantage of Heap Analytics is that it can help you track all actions undertaken by your site visitors. You can simply pick out an event and determine whether or not your product was used or not by visitors from that event. With its auto-tracking functionality, this BI tool can readily be leveraged by startups with limited resources.
#4. Creating Marketing Reports
What is the point in having a mountain of data without the ability to process them into useful reports? The old-school spreadsheets will no longer cut it in the competitive data analysis landscape. What you need is a tool that can help you connect to multipoint data sources, collate the information, and consolidate everything into one powerful presentation.
Fortunately, there are several available BI tools that can do all these for you. One of them is Databox, an all-in-one marketing tool that can process your key metrics into cohesive dashboards. This BI tool’s Drag-and-Drop functionality is not just easy to use even by beginners, but it is also customizable. With its 200+ pre-built templates, it will be a cinch to tailor-fit your presentations to your priorities.
Final thoughts
The four ways to use BI tools for marketing that are mentioned here are but several of many. More and more companies are capitalizing on unprecedented growth opportunities brought about by an increasing reliance on these BI tools. Perhaps it’s about time that you should too.
About the Author:
Bash Sarmiento is a writer and an educator from Manila. He writes laconic pieces in the education, lifestyle, and health realms. His academic background and extensive experience in teaching, textbook evaluation, business management, and traveling are translated into his works.
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