What is Business Intelligence? How to Use it to Enhance Your Marketing
If you’ve got reams of data but don’t know what to do with it, then Business Intelligence (BI) is a hugely effective way of turning your numbers and figures into actionable insights that can give ROI, growth and sales a real boost.
Below, we’ll take a look at how Business Intelligence is being used in more detail, as well as some super effective ways it can help to improve your business’ digital marketing.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a technology-driven process for analysing data and then creating actions which let employees at all levels make better business decisions. It does this by:
- Collecting data from internal and external sources
- Preparing it for analysis
- Running queries against the data
- Creating data visualisations, BI dashboards and reports
What is Business Intelligence used for?
Business Intelligence is used for all sorts of different digital marketing reasons, including the likes of identifying your strengths, eliminating time and resource-intensive processes, increasing your customer base.
The great thing about Business Intelligence is the low barrier to entry. Practically any business, big or small, can put it use, regardless of the type of marketing they specialise in. Better yet, you don’t have to have huge amounts of data; Business Intelligence tools can help you with that – and you can even use third party data if you need to.
Speaking of, BI tools are no longer the remit of tech-whizzes either. It’s easy to find tools that are user friendly and accessible.
Now let’s take a look at some specific marketing activity that Business Intelligence can improve, as well as why doing so benefits businesses of all kinds.
How to use Business Intelligence to enhance your marketing
Identify customer segments
A key application of Business Intelligence, many organisations use BI tools to dig up data on their customers and then use what they learn to create specific segments.
BI tools can classify audiences based on things like demographic info, online behaviour, and their preferred channels. This lets businesses create messaging that’s tailored to and based on these specific interests. And the more they know about their audience, the more they know the kinds of activity that really resonates with them.
Use personalised marketing
With the number of available touchpoints across the internet (including websites, mobile, email, social channels), it can be a challenge to fully map out the journeys that customers go on with you.
For example, BI tools can track these journeys, aggregating who clicked what link on which channel – and whether or not they purchased an item. With this data, marketers can then create more personalised marketing synced up to the preferences of their customer base – something that’s been shown to deliver up to 20% higher satisfaction rates.
Use customer data to uncover fresh opportunities
Your customers’ journeys can be used to benefit you in other ways too. With the data you’ve gathered on their purchasing journeys and habits, you’ll have a clearer of picture of the channels they start their journey through, where they can be found on site, and the purchases they make. Purchase history is also key to working out your customers’ respective life-time value i.e. the total revenue you earn from a customer over time.
When you can better understand their habits, the above insights here will give you more opportunities to upsell and maximise their value through things like offers, discounts and content that you know they’ll love.
Uncover market trends
With all that historical and real-time data you have on hand, Business Intelligence is an excellent way to identify (and predict) trends based on consumer behaviour and your industry at large. When you know what’s popular and what’s on the horizon trend-wise, you can adapt your strategies, develop new products and allocate resources to capitalise on your findings – all of which helps with making more informed decisions.
Upgrade your competitor analysis
As far as giving you a competitive edge goes, Business Intelligence is great at gathering data on what your competitors are doing, and how they’re doing it. Whether it’s through market research, surveys, interviews or your own observations, there’s all sorts of data you can collect on your competition.
And once you’ve analysed it, you can then make better decisions about your own marketing and operations that can keep you ahead of those fighting for their share of the market.
Analyse campaign & channel performance
No business wants to be funnelling money into campaigns that simply aren’t performing. Whether it’s across email, social media, SEO, paid search, display ads or any of your marking channels and activity, BI tools can help you analyse your return on investment by displaying your results for each channel. This’ll let you know the high-performing campaigns you can allocate more budget to, as well as the weaker campaigns you could probably spend less on.
In addition, BI tools can also keep track of website engagement metrics like your most visited pages, bounce rates, button clicks and downloads – all of which can help your lead nurturing tactics by letting you know which content is making the most impact with your visitors.
Analyse your business’ digital marketing maturity
Business Intelligence can help your business’ marketing be more effective in all sorts of ace ways. But, ideally, the right level of maturity has to be achieved before you can see both growth and operational increases.
Our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz can uncover your current level of marketing maturity – and what you need to do to create a roadmap for future success. Ready to see where you’re at? Fill in your details and take the quiz below…
If the success you’ve been striving for is still eluding you, we’ll help you get on the right track. Whatever your marketing goals are, our team of experts will keep them in your sights. To find out more, head to the homepage or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.
