As technology evolves, there are increasingly diverse and exciting ways to improve your marketing strategy. The dawn of AI has enabled business intelligence tools to become even more powerful than they were before. They’re quicker at sifting through data and spotting patterns and ‘cleverer’ at collating those patterns into data that we can easily interpret. So, how can business intelligence tools help to improve things for your own business? We’re going to take a look at how they can work wonders for your marketing. Starting off by learning about exactly what they are!
What Are Business Intelligence Tools?
Let’s start at the very beginning, what actually are business intelligence (BI) tools? These are tools that enable business owners to look closely into the performance of their business, measuring various data points and presenting them as easy-to-digest data. Some of the most common are Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik View, but this is by no means an exhaustive list.
If you’ve got all of the relevant data from your business but are struggling to find patterns, this is exactly the kind of thing that BI tools can help with. You can opt for some of the tools mentioned above, find your own, or even use open source BI tools. This final option is probably better for those with some experience of BI tools already, as the user interface is sometimes slightly more complicated. Anyway, now that you know what BI tools are, it’s time to take a look at some of the ways that they can improve your marketing plan.
Decisions Must be Made with Data
We all like to think that we use all of the information at hand to inform our decision making, particularly when it comes to our business. But truthfully, we don’t. Humans are susceptible to bias in a way that software, technology, and even AI, aren’t. Business intelligence tools can leave prior experiences and subconscious biases out of the equation entirely. Instead, they focus on all of the data that they’ve collected about your business – and trust me, it’s a lot. They can collate this information quickly and spot patterns in it far more easily than humans can, so why not harness that ability?
Companies that use a data-driven marketing strategy are six times more likely to be profitable than companies that don’t. Plus, BI tools collate data and search for trends all the time. If the direction of the market changes, then your marketing team will know about it and can adjust. Quickly.
Tailoring Your Message Made Easier
Has your business got more than one ‘avatar’, a few target markets that are close but not quite the same? Tailoring your marketing to suit the different tiers of your target audience is made a whole lot easier with the help of business intelligence tools. Something as simple as personalizing your emails has been proven to generate six times as many transactions, compared to a generic ‘send to all’.
Another brilliant facet of the BI toolkit is its ability to dig into demographics and behaviors, perhaps segmenting your target audience more than you might have been able to. Being able to look into the finer details of the people visiting your site helps to make it possible to advertise to them more effectively. You might find out that you’ve been missing out on an entire demographic, just from not being able to spot that they were buying from you in the first place. How can you market to someone if you weren’t aware they existed?
It’s Not Only For – Your – Business
Business Intelligence tools don’t only show you the metrics of your own business (unless you want them to). You can also use BI tools to provide insights into exactly what your competitors are doing. Sure, they can’t access the same level of data as they can with your business, but they can provide incredible insights into everything from how your competitors are pricing to the new products they’re offering.
This kind of insight gives you the upper hand. From this, you can get a pretty good grasp of what their marketing strategy might be, and you can adapt yours to challenge it more successfully. Plus, you can spot those unfilled niches, the gaps that they’re not managing to properly address. One or two tiny bits of the untapped market can turn an ‘average’ business into a seriously profitable one. In fact, the vast majority of marketers confirm that thorough competitive analysis is one of the top three elements that’s critical to their success.
Make Tracking Simple (And Useful)
Business intelligence tools offer super-precise tracking of marketing campaign performance. They do this using real-time data analysis – and it doesn’t eat into your own productive hours! By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), you can easily pinpoint which strategies are working and which, well, aren’t. This allows for you to make those critical data-backed decisions, allowing you to change, mold, and reconfigure your marketing plan to fulfill your goals.
A huge advantage of BI tools is that they can automate the reporting process. This frees up valuable time for your marketing team to focus on what they’re good at (new initiatives, creative thinking, problem solving etc.) rather than repetitive and boring manual data handling. BI tools can also help you to discover a ‘granular’ view of campaign metrics. You begin understanding engagement and conversion rates better, thanks to the way the information is presented. This is never a bad thing, but it really comes into its own when devising a marketing plan. If you find something that’s working on all levels, you can reallocate resources swiftly and capitalize on it.
They Can See the Future
One of the – most – powerful assets of modern BI tools lies in predictive analysis. While they can’t take a crystal ball and see into the future, they can draw from previous statistics (of which they’ve got an endless mine) and use this information to interpret what might happen in the future. So not, it’s not a magic crystal ball, but it’s pretty close. This is true not just for your business and its trajectory, but for the market that you operate in, and the consumers that you target.
With this new ability, your marketing team is able to adjust their strategies looking forward, aligning more closely with what the tools think is coming up. Of course, these tools have to be used with immense capacity for change as they don’t know the future, they just predict it. But, if you’ve got a flexible team and you’re using the most up-to-date data (hint, you are, it’s what BI tools do) then you’ve got a fighting chance.
Better still, another asset of the predictive analytics side of these tools is that they can really focus in on ‘customer churn’. This is the rate at which customers stop doing business with a business (it could be buying from you, using your services etc.). If you have a tool that’s capable of spotting patterns indicating customer churn, then you can take steps to stop that churn before you lose a customer. Taking a proactive approach like this can keep your loyal customers loyal and anyone who’s been in business knows that an existing loyal customer is worth more than a new one.
Put Your Money Where Their Money Is
We’ve kind of touched on effective resource allocation already, but it’s crucial. So, let’s take a look at it in more detail and how BI tools can help you with it. Marketing budgets are tight (if yours isn’t, then I’d like to work for you!). So, we have to learn how to make those budgets stretch. Instead of giving every project the same budget to work with, you need to be flexible. Look at the data on which marketing plans are working (with those KPIs we talked about earlier) and give them more of the budget. Your chosen BI tool will analyze the performance of various marketing channels and campaigns and provide insights into which areas are delivering the best returns. You don’t need to lift a finger. Well, maybe one, to press the button! With the information, you call the shots, assign the budget, and make sure the projects that need the funding are getting it.
Better still, BI tools can also facilitate a detailed analysis of cost versus performance. They can highlight which investments yield the highest ROI (return on investment). Like the above, this helps your budget get to the places where it will make the most difference, the most money. Plus, that all-important real-time data lets you change this as and when necessary. You absolutely have to be open to change when using these kinds of tools, but anyone who’s worked on a team that’s slowed to react will know this is an essential part of business anyway. If you’re pressed for time when it comes to sifting through data, save yourself that task. Instead, make sure you always have time to look at the graphs that are hand-fed to you and react.
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