Business Intelligence for Marketing
Marketing relies heavily on an audience that is constantly changing, whether it’s B2B or B2C. Advertising in magazines and newspapers, while still effective, has now been replaced by AdWords and email campaigns.
Over the decades as consumers and businesses shifted their wants and needs, marketing plans had to adapt with them. Messaging has become more personalized with content based on specific demographic data.
Which leads us to the present day. Marketing is no longer just witty content on printed paper. It requires high-level demographic data to pinpoint gender, location, education, as well as cultural and social influences of a population.
This data is used to promote products and services to the right target audience. Currently, a lot of this data is manually assembled using spreadsheets, ERPs, and CRMs.
With a business intelligence platform, all data can be consumed in one place with powerful analytics and reporting to not only target the right market, but to also correlate vital information between digital techniques and leads to ensure strategies are in fact working.
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Marketing: the lead generator
“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” While Ralph Waldo Emerson wasn’t referring to marketing departments, it’s a quote that most marketers can relate to.
Within the marketing department, results are based on the alignment and objectives that a company has set at the beginning of the year. These can change yearly based on outside influences such as the economy and consumer requirements.
These objectives are then used as KPIs that trigger strategies around lead generation that promote the products and services currently being offered. Website traffic, content views, quality of leads, and engagement are among the measurements used to analyze the success of the initiatives set up by the team.
The journey a consumer or business endures can differ based on specific demographics. Perhaps they start with an email campaign and end up at the website filling out a form for a demo. Or perhaps they saw a Google AdWord and proceeded directly to contact the company.
How they begin in the cycle up until the end where they become a prospect or client is closely analyzed in order to understand what strategies work versus those that need to be reviewed.
Unfortunately, when it comes to finding the correlation between leads and successful marketing activities, most marketers have to jump through hoops just to find the data and reports. In order to find out if a campaign, social media post, or video has succeeded in bringing in viable leads, managers have to put together reports that stem from CRMs like HubSpot, ERPs like NetSuite, and even spreadsheets from Google.
Suddenly the user journey becomes a nightmare to analyze. That is, until a BI software is implemented.
The marketer’s journey
Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Data Studio, Spreadsheets, and NetSuite ERP are just a few systems used by those in marketing to track the user journey and discover the progress of a lead.
Each platform houses crucial data that also associates revenue to spend and ROI to initiatives. For example, if a marketing department is spending a lot of money on animated videos, the data in one of these platforms should be able to decipher one of the following: a) these videos are providing direct leads or b) it’s part of the branding initiative that creates a positive user experience, which will eventually push a lead to become a client.
The problem? Finding the right platform with this data and then exporting it to then import it into another software that houses all of the above…manually.
What for exactly? Well, as the world revolves around money, it’s extremely important to have specific data that justifies a precise budget for certain types of tactics. Going into executive meetings with “we had this idea to launch an expensive video series” without any reports pinpointing how videos have helped grow a company’s client base 3 fold in the past year, isn’t going to work.
A business intelligence tool will contribute to connecting all the missing data dots into one big place so a user journey is visible all on one dashboard. It cuts out the “middle-man” of manual data entry. It stops the need for paging through large volumes of data from multiple sources and attempting to put it altogether in a proficient way by cutting out the “middle-man” of manual data entry.
Additionally, a marketer’s journey always crosses paths with the sales team. Alignment with sales is imperative for a company to develop. If a marketing specialist goes to sales with an idea but no data to back it up, it most likely won’t end well. But with a BI tool, marketing can go to sales with the appropriate tools and reports to prove how the strategy works and will more often than not get the support and alignment needed.
The evolving marketing door
The sophistication of a BI platform will help marketers in finding precise analytics as well as the correlation between the data and the proof of strategy success. It will answer certain questions like: what has contributed to brand awareness? How has a lead become a prospect? What is our most popular webpage?
Implementing a business intelligence software is no longer just for finance or executives, for marketers it’s also an essential tool that accelerates innovative techniques that lead to a better performance when promoting a product or service.
The customizable dashboard for BI for marketing research will make it easier for the team to determine what is working and increase the impact on how the department uses the budget and spend.
The transformation of marketing strategy has completely changed over the past few decades. It’s in a constant state of growth due to social, technological, and cultural developments. It’s no surprise then that even though trends come and go, a marketer always needs to have easy access to data analytics to stay ahead of the game.
Regardless of what happens in the world, BI will always be useful to highlight the vital market data that is used to make high-level decisions for companies. Trends come and go and to know which of these trends is worth the investment requires analysis. How? Business intelligence.
For all marketers torn apart by multiple data sources, contact our product team today and see how GURUS Business Intelligence can help your team.
