BI gives firms the data-driven insights they require to steer the marketing process. BI technologies may assist businesses in better understanding their target audience, identifying patterns in customer behavior, measuring the success of marketing efforts across various channels, and gaining insights into competitors. Let’s take a closer look at how businesses might use BI to achieve these objectives.

Discover your data’s quickest path to business intelligence.

• Understand your target market.

Marketing efforts are doomed if a company does not know who its clients are. Customer data is collected by organizations through a variety of channels, including their websites, messages and comments on social media posts, and third-party data sources. Understanding information about client demographics might be the difference between a marketing campaign’s success and failure.

Enterprises can utilize BI technologies to create a picture of their customers across all marketing channels to determine who they should target. For example, a business may use BI to see engagement data across various social media platforms to determine who responds favorably to its social media marketing efforts and then change its marketing to better target that group. A BI tool might also track client lifetime value regularly, ensuring that the organization is focusing its marketing efforts on the most profitable customers and identifying new groups worth interacting with.

• Look for patterns in customer behavior.

Buyers must be addressed with individualized offerings in marketing initiatives. According to Accenture research, about one-third of customers “want the organizations with which they do business to know more about them.” BI tools assist firms in determining how to tailor marketing to fit the needs of their clients.

At the point of purchase, for example, some buyers may look for product specifics on the company’s website, whilst others may rely on peer evaluations on social media or email advertising. A pie chart depicting the distribution of consumers’ favorite channels or a heat map of review sources can help businesses understand how customers engage with products and what characteristics attract them to buy. With such analytics, marketers can conduct relevant, timely, and targeted advertisements, lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increasing consumer engagement.

• Determine the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

Companies spend billions of dollars on marketing; for example, Alphabet spent $2.4 billion on advertising in 2017, while Procter & Gamble spent $4.3 billion. But how can they tell if their expenditures are providing a positive return on investment (ROI)?

BI reports, aided by dashboards and visualization tools, can assist in monitoring and measuring the efficacy of marketing operations. As a result of continuous tracking and reporting, companies can immediately withdraw or refocus their marketing strategy.

Enterprises can utilize BI systems to measure and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate whether marketing initiatives are yielding higher returns, such as:

• Website traffic-to-leads conversion rate
• The ratio of marketing-qualified leads (MQL) to sales-qualified leads (SQL)
• Conversion rates from various channels, including landing sites and emails,
• Unsubscribe rates for emails
• Visitors who return to the website
• Conversion rates in the funnel
• The cost per lead (CPL)
• CAC
• Retention of customers

Consider Netflix: in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company’s marketing spending increased by 57 percent year-on-year, while revenues increased by 27 percent. According to one study, the disparity is due to rising CAC. Winning a new client in the United States now costs Netflix four times what it used to since the firm is running out of fresh families to market to. Netflix might employ business intelligence tools to surface this information, then retool their marketing efforts to lower CAC by, for example, examining underutilized channels or focusing on less saturated markets.

Put yourself ahead of the competition.

Enterprises may also utilize BI reporting to learn more about their competitors and the industry as a whole. Companies may be able to measure their competitors’ performance and compare it to their own using third-party data. They can then alter their efforts to beat the competition by changing pricing, increasing marketing expenditure in a neglected channel, or targeting different demographics, for example.

Businesses can utilize BI to achieve a competitive advantage in a variety of ways. They can analyze specific metrics for newly introduced items, such as website traffic or social media interaction, or assess competitors’ marketing tactics for certain channels, such as email, to see whether their marketing could be improved.