In the digital age, social media and search engine optimization are the cornerstones of marketing strategies for businesses. The amount of data for analysis is increasing exponentially, and businesses are turning to Business Intelligence (BI) for smart decision-making.
Business Intelligence is a technology-driven process of collecting and analyzing data. It is then presented as actionable information to help with making informed business decisions. The new generation of Business Intelligence development tools allows large amounts of data to be quickly analyzed and converted into comprehensive, actionable reports.
Learning more about your customers
Business Intelligence gives businesses a complete picture of their customers. More sophisticated BI tools provide insights into customer behavior that makes marketing to them much more effective.
Social media analytics gathers data such as comments, mentions, shares and likes across various social sites. Brands can identify what exactly customers like or dislike about their products, how they compare to the competitors and whether their engagement efforts are successful.
Social monitoring tools can gather information from many different social platforms to identify data that are relevant to a particular brand. This helps companies to analyze social conversations around their brands so they can make better marketing decisions. These tools usually have a multitude of different features ranging from demographic insights to sentiment analysis.
Another type of helpful BI tools, web analytics is used to determine how much traffic is coming to the website, where it’s coming from and which pages get the highest number of impressions. Businesses can determine which keywords on the website generate the most traffic and where customer bounce rate is the highest or lowest. Using this information, the website content can be adjusted to draw more visitors.
Removing the guesswork
Before digital marketing, making well-informed decisions was not that easy because businesses didn’t have enough data to base their marketing campaigns on. Now, Business Intelligence has replaced the guesswork that was often needed in the past.
The new BI tools can easily extract and configure data from many online sources. Collecting data such as click-through rates, keyword searches, and social shares are helpful in determining the most effective online marketing channels for a specific business. Businesses can find out what tactics gain the most traction.
Compete is just one of the many tools used by businesses to obtain digital insights and helping to compete online. It allows keeping track of competitors and set benchmarks against their performance. It can track consumer behavior, identify which strategies are most likely to succeed and reveal untapped opportunities.
Using real-time data analysis
Digital data quickly gets outdated. That’s why marketers can improve costs and marketing performance by using real-time analytics. With this, companies can market across multiple channels and know precisely when and where to increase or decrease their ad spends.
Real-time analytics allows companies to respond to customers and offer support in real-time to meet customers’ expectations of getting their needs addressed quickly. More importantly, marketers can use real-time data to develop content that appeals to their brand audience. Such analytics can help them target their audience, structure a marketing campaign and decide how to execute it.
Once leads come in, companies can utilize other tools to make sure leads are efficiently guided through the sales funnel. Such tools allow companies to analyze the touch points and interactions and tweak them accordingly to personalize the customer experience.
Real-time analytics is particularly helpful in fast-moving industries such as lifestyle, beauty, and fashion. Here, marketing strategies that are in tune with the very latest trends are vital.
For example, Klipfolio is a monitoring tool that provides real-time information, helping marketers to see what’s happening at the moment. If businesses need to grasp constantly changing information and to take action quickly, such a monitoring tool will be a good fit.
Choosing the most suitable Business Intelligence tools
First, businesses need to define their Business Intelligence strategy. Without this strategy, they may end up buying the most expensive tools that are not suited for their purposes. Once they have decided on a plan, they can start defining the criteria.
In this regard, using the BI Survey can give insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the most popular tools as it lists all the features and compares them in 15 different categories.
Reading product reviews can also be a good starting point for those who are choosing such tools for the first time. However, these reviews are often focused on products with the largest variety of features while it is important to select tools with the must-have features first. A must-have, for instance, may be a web-based client user interface or the ability for a user to blend data from various sources. Ease of use, scalability, and performance are three more criteria to evaluate BI tools. Tools should also fit the budget and be easy to implement.
The choice will largely depend on what kind of Business Intelligence they need. If available off-the-shelf products prove to be no good for your business needs, going for Business Intelligence development instead can make a profound difference to the business decision-making that’s backed with factual data.
About the Author: Having more than 8 years of writing experience, Smridhi is a professional tech, health and travel blogger. She loves to gather and share her profound knowledge about latest developments in technology. Smridhi is a management graduate and visual graphics artist and is currently pursuing masters in behavioral psychology. Her hobbies are practicing mindfulness, counseling children and traveling (a special love for Africa).
