Business intelligence is no longer an option today but a necessity for most enterprises to survive and thrive. To remain competitive in the modern business environment, one must find more ways of doing things better and faster, whether it be in sales, finance, or any other area. One department that is increasingly becoming more and more data-reliant is marketing. Marketers have discovered the power of data through different B.I. tools to help them make better decisions. This article will discuss how marketing teams can profit from business intelligence to achieve their respective goals. But first, let’s have a run-through of what business intelligence is all about.
An Overview of Business Intelligence
In the late 19th century, Richard Miller Devens first presented the term “business intelligence” in his book Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes. He coined it to accurately describe how the banker Sir Henry Furnese used data to stay one step ahead of the competition. Although B.I. strategies were already existing way back then, it was only in the late 1980s, when technology started to boom, that business people started to pay attention to B.I. Companies everywhere began to realize how valuable B.I. could be in enhancing their performance and achieving company goals. So, what does business intelligence mean?
What is Business Intelligence?
One school of thought sees B.I. as an umbrella term that envelops the entire process and infrastructure of collecting, analyzing, and delivering actionable insights. For this group, business analytics is seen as a subset of B.I. Yet, many data scientists and engineers have also created a clear delineation between the two. For the latter, business intelligence specifically refers to the monitoring, collecting, and analyzing past and present information to improve current performance. On the other hand, they see business analytics as the process that leverages historical and current data to predict future patterns (more prescriptive than predictive).
However, the latter may already be an outdated view as historical and present data can evidently be used both for current analytics and forecasting. So, in short, we’re sticking with the first encompassing perspective. Having cleared that out, let’s enumerate the ways by which your marketing team can benefit from B.I.
What are the benefits of using B.I. for Marketing teams?
1. Faster creation of reports
As B.I. vendors increased in the ‘80s with the boom of B.I., more innovative tools became available in the market. The development of relational database technology provided access to multiple data points from different sources. SQL, a specialized programming language, enabled communication to these databases, making it easy to update or retrieve data. With the speed of gathering and validating information, the result was faster reporting with higher accuracy.
2. Higher-quality data
No matter how intelligent and diligent your marketing team is, if the raw information their reports are based on is incomplete, irrelevant, or has duplications, you’ll be making faulty decisions. With B.I., your marketing team can clean up the data to avoid such errors and adequately prepare it for analytics. B.I. processes can remove irrelevant data observations, filter unwanted outliers (unusual values that distort statistical analyses), and correct the formatting for more usability. The outcome is data that is correct, consistent, and highly relevant.
3. More streamlined operations
Imagine if your business has more than 20, even 50 databases, and you need to secure regular reports, comparing the multiple data points to glean insights and improve current operations. In the past, you’d have to hire several encoders, who would then need to work long hours just to be able to manually input all the information into excel sheets to create the databases. And then, the data will be forwarded to your marketers for further manipulation into the necessary reports. Not only will the written findings tend to be outdated and less relevant by the time they’re done, but you would also have wasted precious company resources in man-hours and dollars. By using a B.I. application that can integrate the different data sources, you can automate your process and channel your resources into higher-value activities.
4. A better understanding of customers
Today’s customers have become increasingly complex. To help ensure that brand awareness leads to their conversion and retention, you’ll need to see how they behave and what triggers them at every stage of the marketing funnel. B.I. can give you that comprehensive perspective so you can adjust your marketing strategy or change your approach to better meet the customers’ needs and preferences as they move along the funnel. B.I. can also help you maximize your resources by leading you to customer groups that deliver the highest value or ROI.
5. Improved reaction time to market trends
B.I. enables you to receive real-time analytics through the direct retrieval of information from various channels and feeding this into a real-time B.I.system or data warehouse. This way, you can gather timely data onto a dashboard to make quicker decisions in response to changing customer behavior.
6. Better estimation of the competition
With speedy access to relevant and reliable information, you can deep-dive better into your company’s strengths and weaknesses and ascertain threats and opportunities. Through B.I., you can also stay up-to-speed with your competitors’ strategies to readily adapt a counter-campaign that will help neutralize their efforts to compete for your customers.
The Bottom Line
Business intelligence is not just a set of high-tech tools. Rather, it is an overarching strategy hinged on the power of data to transform businesses. B.I. continues to be as relevant now as when it was first introduced, perhaps more so. So don’t get left behind in this increasingly data-driven world. Gain the competitive advantage and choose the right marketing agency to help you get started on your B.I. journey today.
About The Author: Bash Sarmiento
Bash Sarmiento is a writer and an educator from Manila. He writes laconic pieces in the education, lifestyle, and business realms. His academic background and extensive experience in teaching, textbook evaluation, business management, and traveling are translated into his works.