Consider that in 2019, one Internet minute is equivalent to 300,000 Instagram scrolls, 1 million Facebook logins, $1 million spent online, over 40 million messages sent, and almost 4 million Google searches.
Not using a tool to measure what is happening to your brand in this environment can be ignorant. Marketers can use every piece of this information, and the fact that the client receives it for free the majority of the time is an additional incentive to make the most of it.
Business intelligence (BI) offers companies the opportunity to keep track of all discussions, trends, and potential threats to the brand integrity in a simple visual dashboard. Such systems provide multiple advantages in terms of time, accuracy, decision-making, and even employee stress levels.
Here are a few of the ways a BI tool can help companies make the most out of their digital marketing campaigns, leverage budgets, and get a better ROI overall in the spirit of ‘what gets measured, gets done’.
Optimize Marketing Campaigns
Social media has almost replaced traditional news portals for younger people and could potentially become more influential than TV. This is also an overcrowded environment where millions of brands are striving for an increasingly smaller attention span. That is why every marketer needs to fine-tune their approach to social media. The best way to do this is to look at results in almost real time.
At a glance, BI shows you which channels are the most profitable for your brand. Going a step deeper, it also provides information about the performance of each item in marketing communications, whether it is a visual ad, a keyword, or an e-mail headline. By implementing A/B testing for each of these components, you can quickly refine your message and get better results.
Make Sense of Customer Behavior
By looking at millions of data points, a BI tool with big data analysis capabilities can automatically create user profiles and synthesize responses. Such a tool can take into consideration online comments, social media tags, hashtags, likes, shares, and more online actions.
This way, marketers can determine the prevailing sentiment per age group, location, and other relevant customer dimensions. They can also identify the preferred channel of each target group and the messages which performed best, in order to replicate the success.
Guard Your Brand
A BI system can scan the web, specifically social media platforms for brand mentions. If these are positive, the brand can thank the author of the post or even give a small token in appreciation. On the other hand, if your brand is attacked or is the subject of negative news, you should be able to jump into the conversation immediately and protect your brand.
The advantage of this approach is that it offers you an overview of your brand’s perception across the web. If you combine it with a geographical mapping tool, you can identify the areas that need extra care.
Use Numbers Instead of Guesswork
Financial decisions are always taken based on clear KPIs and transparent measurements. Why would marketing operate on gut feeling and guesswork only? Until BI tools became popular, though, this was the reality. Marketing directors would take decisions based mostly on their previous experience and the approval of their team or executives. This worked well for known markets or products but could end up in a disaster when it came to targeting new segments or launching new products.
The quantitative capabilities of BI solutions can help your organization compare your tactics and performance with competitors and industry leaders. This makes it easier to evaluate progress and set new, achievable targets.
Analyze in Real Time
The two major characteristics of digital data emerging from social media are that it comes in large quantities and becomes outdated very fast. If an organization aims to turn these into actionable insights, it needs to process them as soon as they come up.
This allows companies to offer immediate support and meet expectations on the spot. Most customers are impressed by such timely responses and generate positive content about the brand as a result.
The industries that can benefit most from these tools are those which change at a fast pace: logistics, transportation, beauty, fashion, and retail.
Pick the Right BI Features
When selecting a BI tool for digital marketing, there are several essential characteristics to consider, since not all BI software is created equal.
First, you need to think about data retrieving and cleaning. It is best if the tool integrates seamlessly with major social media platforms, mailing apps, as well as your CRM, and can also perform web scraping for brand mentions.
The next step is to ensure your BI platform can analyze data by creating meaningful connections, or relationships, between various data sources. Some tools require humans to connect the components, while others rely on artificial intelligence.
Most importantly, the results of the analytics should be displayed in a form that is easy to understand even by novices, who don’t have much data science knowledge, or executives who only have a very limited amount of time to take a decision. Graphs, bars, maps, pie charts should all be used in the best way possible to illustrate the point.
Depending on the goal of the analyzed campaign, users should be able to switch easily between sources, channels, and paid and organic traffic to look at the conversion dynamics.
Why Your Marketing Team Should Consider BI
Time is money, and as our lives are getting more hectic and information more overwhelming, we need aggregating tools delivering clear insights. There is not enough time anymore to rely on weekly or monthly reports; real-time decisions make the difference for the brands that will survive and those that will lose this technological race.
BI is more than a dashboard. It is a tool that can produce predictions and make the work of the marketing department more streamlined and informed with actual numbers instead of guesswork.
