In the past, the sales funnel was very clear, consisting of four stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and purchase. However, this is no longer the case. With the rise of social media and digital marketing, the lines in the four stages have become blurry. It's common for someone to see a product video ad on Instagram and buy it immediately.

That also means that the most critical part of digital marketing is now to show up on the platforms where your audience hangs out. But this will bring several challenges: understanding who your customers are, where to find them, and when to find them in those places. 

The solution to these challenges lies in business intelligence; therefore, its role in digital marketing should not be understated. This article will explain the importance of business intelligence in digital marketing and provide an actionable guide.

What is Business Intelligence in Digital Marketing?

Business intelligence uses technology to analyze data and gain insights to inform business decisions. It enables you to collect, clean, analyze, and interpret data. You can then use it to make decisions and enhance your marketing processes and results. When your business has clean and well-organized data, you will make better decisions and reach your marketing goals more quickly. 

There are many business intelligence sources, such as website analytics, social listening tools, social media analytics, email marketing analytics, and many more. Once you have the data, you can use it within and outside your digital marketing, such as corporate strategy, product development, and customer care.

For the BI to effectively market and model, it must reside in one place. This provides businesses with a single overview of their customers and target audience. They can also track the channels their customers are using.

Importance of Business Intelligence for Digital Marketing

Is it worth investing in business intelligence when doing digital marketing? If this is your question, there are several benefits you need to know about. These are:

Better Strategies and Decision-making

We have already mentioned how business intelligence helps with decision-making. However, since this is the primary goal of business intelligence, it is worth emphasizing. Acquiring better business intelligence will give you better insights into your strategies. It eliminates guesswork and overreliance on outdated beliefs, information, and processes. It provides the latest data to help you develop more informed strategies.

Identify Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends

When running marketing campaigns, you want to stay on top of everything. One tool that will help you spot opportunities and challenges as they arise is business intelligence. Then, you can use the data from business analysis to improve your campaign. In the same way, business analytics will help you uncover industry trends that you can use to enhance your marketing. This will ensure that your business is better placed in your market.

Identify Their Ideal Customers

To grow your business, you need to know who to market to. However, many companies still struggle to determine their perfect customer. Accurate BI can help you segment your customers into different categories. This is because BI tools have a data visualization feature that defines the characteristics of these customers.

Increase Efficiency

Business intelligence is also an excellent tool for detecting inefficiencies in your business processes. You can work to improve these inefficiencies and achieve better digital marketing results.

Competitor Analysis

Business intelligence can provide insights into what your competitors are doing. You can steal ideas from them and uncover opportunities that they are missing. You can then use this information to create better converting digital marketing campaigns.

Revenue Growth

We have seen how business intelligence can result in better digital marketing campaigns. By optimizing your campaigns, you can be assured of higher sales and more revenue. 

Ways to Use Business Intelligence in Digital Marketing

We have already seen the importance of business intelligence in digital marketing. But where exactly can you use BI in your campaigns? Here are several areas:

Understand the Best-performing Digital Marketing Strategies

BI will help you evaluate your campaigns to determine which ones are performing and which aren't. By understanding which strategies are working, you can optimize your campaigns by focusing more on practical methods and eliminating the underperforming ones.

For instance, most of your customers come from Instagram ads, while a few conversions are from display ads. You can allocate more of your budget to your Instagram marketing strategy while reducing the display ads budget.

Better Understanding of Your Audience

Business intelligence will also provide essential insights into your audience. It will show important insights into who your audience is, their behaviors, interests, the platforms they use the most, and more. With a better understanding of your audience, you can understand the promotional methods and materials that will work best for them. Then, you can use this knowledge to tailor your marketing campaigns to their needs.

For instance, if you sell gym equipment and understand a particular customer who loves working out, you can show them an ad for the latest treadmills. You can also use this information to add your customers to different categories of your marketing emails depending on their demographics, interests, or pain points.

Conversion Tracking and Optimization

Companies are spending a lot of money on digital marketing. Therefore, they need to understand if these marketing efforts bring a positive Return on Investment. By checking the BI reports, visualization tools, and dashboards, companies can monitor their efforts to determine their effectiveness. By continuous reporting and tracking, they can quickly withdraw and realign their strategies per marketing needs.

With good business intelligence, you can optimize your website to increase purchases, increase email list sign-ups, and do much more. Using business intelligence tools for digital marketing can provide you with information on converting customers. You can then track the steps they took before their conversions to determine the most effective marketing method. 

When visitors arrive at your site, you can analyze the data from the visited page to determine which web pages are the most effective for converting them. You can also obtain information on where they clicked to determine the page elements that convert visitors.

Market Trend Analysis

When running a digital marketing campaign, you must provide your buyers with tailor-made offerings. An Accenture report indicates that a third of consumers expect the companies they buy from to engage with them to understand them. Besides, for success in digital marketing, you need to understand the dynamics of your market. With BI tools, organizations can understand how to tailor their offerings to the customer's needs.

With Business Intelligence, you can analyze market trends to get insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and shifts in the industry. BI tools will show you the latest trends on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Therefore, you can understand what is happening in your entire market and adjust your digital marketing strategies to match the customer’s expectations.

For instance, when buying a product, some customers seek peer reviews while others check out the company's website. By using a pie chart diagram showing the channels used by the customers, businesses can understand how customers interact with their products and the factors that enticed them to purchase them. Once a company gets such insights, it can make timely, relevant, and personalized campaigns that minimize customer acquisition costs. This can also result in improved customer engagement.

Analyze the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Marketing business intelligence lets you analyze whether your campaigns perform well in real-time. This will enable you to track key metrics such as conversion rates, average watch time, ROI, and click-through rates. With data-driven analysis, you can optimize any campaign that may be underperforming, enable more effective resource allocation, and make data-based decisions.

Types Of BI Software and Tools 

You can use different types of BI tools in your digital marketing campaigns. These include:

• Spreadsheets. You can use Google Docs and Microsoft Excel as your BI tools.
• Data visualization software. These can translate datasets into beautiful, easy-to-read graphical representations that provide crucial insights.
• Reporting software. These tools organize, report, filter, and display data.
• Data mining tools. Data mining is an area of BI. Businesses can leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to get statistics.
• Online analytical processing. The goal of the OLAP tool is to provide users with data analysis from different perspectives depending on the business perspective.

Understanding the Four Concepts of Business Intelligence

There are several fundamental concepts of Business Intelligence. These are:

Data Collection & Integration

Data collection is the process of collecting data from different sources, such as external APIs, internal databases, spreadsheets, etc. This data is usually cleaned and integrated before storing it in a content analysis format.

Data Analysis

Various BI professionals use the analytics tool to find and check data to determine trends, patterns, correlations, and anomalies. You can uncover essential insights using statistics methods and machine learning.

Data Visualization

Data visualization aims to turn complex data into graphs, charts, and dashboards. This visualization is essential for stakeholders to gain fast insights and make wise decisions based on the information provided.

Dashboards and Reporting

BI often creates reports with interactive dashboards showing key performance indicators. These reports provide insights into business performance and enable users to delve deeper into the details.

Decision Support

Another critical goal of Business Intelligence is to provide accurate, timely, and relevant insights for strategic decision-making. When the data is aligned with your business goal, you can optimize your processes, notice opportunities, and effectively address any challenges.

The above Business Intelligence concepts enable businesses to use data as critical assets. Companies can contract professionals to allow them to understand their needs, develop suitable data models, design visualizations, and ensure the insights are integrated into their daily operations. This can improve their competitiveness and performance.

Types of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence can be put into three different categories. These are:

Traditional BI

This is a form of business analysis that focuses more on historical data. Some of the steps in this data analysis includes extracting, cleaning, and loading the data from different sources into the data store. The data is then used to create dashboards and reports to help users understand past trends and to make informed decisions. One of the benefits of traditional BIS is tracking the KPIs.

Self-Service Business intelligence

This form of BI is meant for non-technical users to access and analyze the data independently. The approach is often helpful in creating reports, visualizations, and dashboards using user-friendly platforms and tools. Users can explore the data in real-time and gain valuable insights.

Advanced Analytics

This BI focuses more on prescriptive and predictive analysis. It, therefore, predicts future outcomes and trends using more than just historical data. It incorporates other techniques, such as machine learning and predictive modeling to determine patterns. Prescriptive analytics aims to determine the steps for decision optimization depending on the predicted outcomes.

Remember that these BI types can be combined to create a detailed data-driven strategy. The strategy best suited for your organization will depend on its goals and level of expertise.

How BI, Business Analytics, and Data Analytics Work Together

You might have heard the terms business intelligence, data analytics, and business analytics used interchangeably. While they are closely related, they are also quite different. Business intelligence incorporates business analytics and data analytics in its process. It involves data scientists digging into the data, specifically using predictive analysis and advanced statistics to uncover patterns and determine future trends.

Data analytics investigate the cause of a situation and try to predict what will happen next. It considers the algorithm and model and interprets the result into action-oriented steps. Business analytics also includes applied analysis, predictive analysis, and data mining. For instance, you can check Twitter analytics to determine what will happen next. Therefore, business and data analytics are still part of the greater business intelligence strategy.

When making decisions or business planning, business intelligence helps answer queries and provides insights into decision-making. The analytics process can be improved using follow-up iterations and questions. Remember that business analytics isn't a linear process because once you get an answer to the question, there is always a follow-up question. 

Instead, the whole process looks like a cycle that revolves around the access, exploration, discovery, and sharing of information, which is what is termed the “analytics cycle”. This cycle refers to how an organization reacts to changing expectations and questions.

Conclusion

Businesses use business intelligence (BI) to guide their digital marketing strategies and processes. BI helps companies find customer behavior trends, understand audiences, and determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Therefore, if you want to see success with your digital marketing, you need to incorporate BI. By following our guide, you can understand the areas in which business intelligence can be used in digital marketing. We recommend reading our guide on using Twitch for digital marketing.