How Business Intelligence Aligns with Marketing Priorities

With each passing week, it seems as though there’s a constant flow of new sleek technologies for us in Marketing Operations to evaluate for our tech stack. As we keep adding to our tech stack, and each technology creates its own data, it gets to a certain point where we have to take stock of what’s really driving value for our team.

As Marketing is moving from the fringes of a company to a crucial data-driven machine, we need to find a solution that directly aligns with our priorities and initiatives. In our last blog post, we hypothesized how Business Intelligence can improve your marketing tech stack, now we’re going to prove how BI is more than a cog in your tech stack, but a crucial solution to achieving marketing success.

Access to Data

Intuition no longer cuts it, whether you’re in Marketing, Product or Customer Success. With today’s exponential proliferation of data, Marketing organizations can no longer afford to make decisions based on intuition or gut-feeling. It’s like a coin toss. If you’re right, that’s luck. If you’re wrong, in business, you can’t blame it on intuition.

Today’s Marketing Operations professionals are now eliminating intuition and relying on data. With that, they need access to data. With a deep integration and understanding of marketing data, it allows us to make smarter decisions, based on data, which is our goal.

With Business Intelligence (BI), we’re able to get direct access to our data, opening the gate to making decisions based on data. With a BI solution, you’re able to ask questions that you normally wouldn’t be able to ask and understand consumer behavior at a granular level. Intuition-based decision-making is a slippery slope, you wouldn’t want to make a $10,000 marketing spend decision based on a hunch. But, you’d be more inclined to make a decisions with data to back up your decision.

Driven By Insights

With access to data, you’ll gain insights into your business from marketing performance to understanding customer behavior (more on this later). Through insights, you’ll be able to appropriately define metrics and measure success that aligns with your overall business.

For example, you can create a funnel dashboard that shows event funnel that your organization cares about including:

• Marketing funnel

• Conversion funnel

• Pipeline funnel

• Content Marketing funnel

• Lead Generation funnel

You can get insights for your entire marketing process from Events to AdWords to Email Marketing, and therefore easily justify your decision-making.

Campaign Optimization

One example of decision-making is optimizing your campaigns for conversion. We previously gave an example of spending $10,000 on a marketing campaign, let’s elaborate on this.

Let’s say that this is an AdWords campaign running for two months, without access to data and insights via a BI solution, we’d have no idea if this campaign is worth the spend. However, since we’ve implemented a BI solution and have combined our AdWords data with our CRM data, we know that we can optimize the campaign and pay less because our conversion rate is high.

With this invaluable insight, we can now do a few things with this campaign:

• Extend the duration of the campaign

• Increase the campaign spend

• Pause the campaign because we’ve reached our conversion goal

If we were to look only at the AdWords analytics, we wouldn’t know this additional piece of information that is within our CRM system. Being able to quickly and accurately optimize campaigns, it’s no wonder why BI is growing in popularity for Marketing teams.

Improved Customer Experience

As customers are in more control of the buyer’s journey than ever before, we as marketers are in a tough position to align our solutions with their challenges. However, in gaining access to data and discovering invaluable insights, it all leads to one truth: an improved customer experience.

According to market research, “it takes 12 positive experiences to repair the damage caused by a single unresolved negative one.” And since companies already have the lesser hand in this battle, insights into customer behavior is more necessary than ever.

Through a BI, we gain a 360 view of our customer—from what keywords are working, the source in which the enter our website, what content they’ve consumed, when they converted and what carries on once they’ve entered the Sales funnel.

In learning from those data points, we can iterate and replicate what’s working, and predict what we should be doing in the future to attract more customers and improve the overall experience.

Conclusion

Business Intelligence aligns with any Marketing organizations top priorities of understanding the customer and accurately targeting them with relevant ads, copy and content. While the Marketing tech stack continues to grow, consider adding BI to your stack if you haven’t done so already, the upsides can prove to be successful.