Business Intelligence: How to Use it to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Business Intelligence: How to Use it to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Shane Barker 20/01/2021 5
Business Intelligence: How to Use it to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts

You may already be running marketing campaigns with small or large budgets and generating leads and sales for your brand.

However, as a marketer, your goal should be to get the biggest bang for your buck. 

How can you achieve that?

The way ahead is by optimizing your campaigns to generate better results. One very critical element of marketing optimization is data.

Without data, you can’t figure out how you’re currently performing and what needs to be done to take your campaigns to the next level. This is exactly where business intelligence comes into the picture.

Business intelligence has a crucial role to play in digital marketing campaign optimization. But before we get into how you can optimize your campaigns using it, let’s take a quick look at what exactly business intelligence is.

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? 

Business intelligence is essentially the process of collecting data and then analyzing it to derive actionable insights. These insights that you’ve gathered can help with better decision making and help you drive business growth.

Such data-driven decision making tends to be accurate too as it’s not based on an assumptions. 

So, now that you have a good idea of what business intelligence is all about, let’s see how you can leverage it to boost your digital marketing efforts.

HOW TO USE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TO BOOST YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING EFFORTS

Here’s how you can use business intelligence to deliver a boost to your marketing campaigns. 

1. Understand Your Customers Better

To improve your marketing efforts, you need to have a clear idea of who your target customer is. If you fail to understand that, it’s likely that you’ll not be able to make the most out of your budget.

While you may already have a good understanding of your target customers and might even have segregated them into various buyer personas, it helps to learn more about them. 

That’s where business intelligence and analytics can help you. By using social media analytics tools and web analytics tools, you can find out the driving force behind your audience. You can also take the help of a social media marketing expert to understand and prepare a competitive business strategy.

What’s more?

The data collected can also help you get detailed insights into their interests and behavior. As a result, you’ll be able to paint a better picture of your audience. This, in turn, will enable you to customize your marketing campaigns better to suit their interests. 

And that’s not even the best part.

You may also be able to discover a completely new audience segment that you might have thought of while creating your buyer personas.

2. Improve Email Marketing

Business intelligence can also help improve your email marketing campaigns by helping you personalize them better. By gathering data about a particular customer, you can find out their likes, dislikes, and interests.

Using these insights, you can personalize your email campaigns such that they’re absolutely relevant for them. This personalization can play a major role in helping you generate sales. That’s because about 91% of consumers say that they would likely shop from brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations.

For instance, you could send out emails with product recommendations based on how the customer has browsed your ecommerce site.

Amazon does this extremely well in their email campaigns.

Improve_Email_Marketing.png

3. Real-Time Analytics

When you use business intelligence, you can get data and analytics in real-time. This is especially important because even weeks-old data can become obsolete and may not help your cause.

How does real-time analytics help? 

Once you’ve got access to real-time analytics, you’ll be able to make decisions about marketing optimization in real-time too. This can help drive greater sales for your business.

By seeing how your campaigns are performing in real-time, you can instantly change their parameters to optimize them. Mailcheal and other analytics 

What’s more?

It’s also possible to deliver a more personalized user experience through real-time business intelligence and analytics. 

Netflix, for example, does this extremely well. Their algorithm changes the thumbnails of each movie or TV show regularly to improve the chances of their users clicking on them. All their recommendations also change based on what you’ve watched. This helps them keep their users hooked to the platform.

Real-Time_Analytics_Picture.png

Image via Netflix TechBlog

4. Predictive Analytics

One of the best ways through which you can provide a big boost to your digital marketing campaigns through business intelligence is with predictive analytics. Using the power of machine learning, you can predict future outcomes and accordingly modify your campaigns.

How so?

Based on the data collected and analyzed, you can find out product usage patterns, prices and discounts that work, etc. 

These valuable insights can play a crucial role in optimizing your digital marketing campaigns.

Sephora, for example, uses business intelligence and predictive analytics to find out when their customers are likely to run out of their products. 

They send out emails just before the product is estimated to run out. These emails ask them to restock their products and also have a link to purchase them.

Sephora_Predictive_Analytics.png

Image via Sailthru

FINAL THOUGHTS

Business intelligence can play a decisive role in helping you grow your business and taking it to the next level. It can do so by giving you insights to optimize your marketing campaigns for the better.

Using customer analytics, you can understand your customers better. As a result, you’ll be able to target your campaigns better and even personalize your recommendations. 

What’s more?

You can also get real-time analytics and insights through business intelligence and these can help in real-time personalized marketing campaigns. 

Finally, using predictive analytics, you can further bolster your digital marketing efforts.

Due to all the benefits to business that the correct implementation of analytics can bring, it has never been more important to invest in this area.  There are various ways you could do this, from employing analytics professionals to upskilling your current staff by putting them through an online business analytics MBA. The right analytics staff will be a valuable asset in helping you develop, grow and remain a competitive entity.

Do you have any questions about the methods of using business intelligence mentioned above? Ask them in the comments.

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  • Carol Haggerty

    Excellent article Shane !!

  • Lisa Watson

    BI’s importance is growing in 2021.

  • Alex Lawley

    The quickening pace of business intelligence adoption is the antidote businesses have been looking for to tackle covid-19.

  • Olaf Mendez

    Business intelligence implementation brings more insights to marketing department.

  • Aaron Max

    Well explained

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Shane Barker

Digital Strategy Expert

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the Co-Founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.

   
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