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Business intelligence in marketing: end-to-end solution overview
October 10, 2024
Business intelligence in marketing is a technology-enabled process of collecting, preparing, analyzing, and visualizing business data to help decision-makers optimize marketing campaigns, improve customer engagement, and achieve maximum conversions.
Itransition delivers scalable and secure business intelligence solutions that provide companies with easily comprehensible insights essential for overseeing the marketing process and building a winning marketing strategy.
Business intelligence for marketing: top 7 use cases
Business analytics is a solid foundation for many marketing activities. Here are the main areas where business intelligence helps marketing experts make data-driven decisions.
Identifying & targeting the right audience
Companies can collect and process customer demographic information, data on preferred product lines/services and interaction patterns and consumer behavior across multiple channels to timely reach out to the right segments of their audience and come up with the right message.
Calculating customer lifetime value
Marketing specialists can track customer lifetime value (CLV) to direct their efforts more effectively, target the most profitable customers, and identify new audiences worth engaging with.
Measuring marketing campaigns’ performance
Marketing BI adopters can determine the best-performing marketing tactics to focus on the most effective methods, abandon or revamp marketing strategies, optimize marketing budget allocation, and identify cost-saving opportunities.
Building a customer golden record
Using BI, marketers can get a 360-degree customer view with the data collected from different heterogeneous sources, create customer journey maps, and personalize interactions and activities across various marketing channels.
Assisting with product development
Marketers can gain a deep understanding of the target market, identify the most profitable customer segments and a potential customer base, analyze customer needs, their feedback and sentiment, and competitor offerings to inform the product management team about the spotted gaps in the market.
Competitor benchmarking
Marketing specialists can research market trends and competitor marketing campaigns as well as conduct an advanced analysis of a competitor’s audience to find new customer segments and adjust current marketing efforts.
Developing marketing campaigns & strategies
Companies can analyze their marketing effort efficiency by tracking website traffic, goal completion rates, leads, conversion rates, and marketing ROI, create new campaigns, and plan merchandising activities and loyalty programs.
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BI for marketing: real-life example
Benchmark dashboards for ad campaign optimization
The customer is a leading digital media company that uses its marketing platform to promote clients via organic and paid promotion methods. The company decided to revamp its data analysis and visualization processes to monitor and predict ad campaigns’ progress more effectively. Itransition developed a set of analytics optimization solutions equipped with dynamic dashboards and customizable campaign-specific benchmarks, which helped the customer make realistic forecasts and real-time predictions, as well as monitor advertising campaign performance through user-friendly dashboards. With a newly implemented analytics solution, the customer managed to improve their benchmark achievement and reduce overspending by sevenfold.
8x
improved benchmark achievement
Essential integrations for BI in marketing
Integrating the following data sources with marketing BI software enhances data relevancy and accuracy, enabling more accurate analytics insights and informed decision-making.
Marketing BI solution components
Data integration & quality management software
to help manage and automate data ingestion, transformation, cleansing, and other data processing tasks to prepare data for storage and analysis.
Database management systems
for structuring and storing corporate data in a central data warehouse for further analysis, while ensuring data quality, security, and compliance.
BI tools & data analytics software
for analyzing, delivering, and visualizing business information to help marketing teams monitor KPIs, track progress, and spot inefficiencies.
Top business intelligence tools for marketing
Because of the diversity of business intelligence tools on the market, choosing a solution that covers specific business needs often poses a challenge for decision-makers. To make the selection process easier, start by exploring BI software market leaders, featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report. All of the solutions below provide comprehensive data management features, advanced analytical capabilities, and a wide range of visualization and reporting options but vary in cost and specialized functionality, so companies of different sizes and specialties can choose the one that suits them best.
Key features
- Connects to hundreds of data sources in the cloud and on-premises, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Excel
- Native integration with Microsoft products, including Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL database, Azure Machine Learning Studio
- Support for DAX, Power Query, SQL, R, and Python
- Advanced AI (text analytics, image detection, automated ML)
- Self-service data preparation, analysis, reporting, and visualization
- Pre-built and custom visuals
- NLP capabilities
- Team commenting and content subscriptions
- Mobile support
- Embedded BI
- Row-level and object-level security, user authentication, data encryption, data sensitivity labels
Pricing
Power BI Desktop
free
Power BI Pro
$10 per user/month
Power BI Premium
$20 per user/month
Free trial
2-month free trial for each new user
Limitations
- Data handling capacity for a free version is relatively limited
Key features
- Connects to multiple data sources, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Cloudera, Hadoop, Amazon Athena, SQL Server, Dropbox, Presto, SingleStore
- Self-service data preparation
- No-code analytical data querying
- Support for time series and forecasting
- Team collaboration and sharing
- Drag-and-drop user interface
- NLP capabilities
- Custom dashboard creation
- Row-level security, user filters, user authentication
- Mobile-ready
- Embedded analytics
Pricing
Tableau Creator
$75/user/month
Tableau Enterprise Creator
$115/user/month
Tableau Explorer
$42/user/month
Tableau Enterprise Explorer
$70/user/month
Tableau Viewer
$15/user/month
Tableau Enterprise Viewer
$35/user/month
Free trial
2-week
Limitations
- Comprehensive tech support is required to maintain the system long-term
Key features
- Connects to hundreds of data sources, including Salesforce, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics, DropBox, Google Analytics, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle
- Self-service data preparation, analytics, and reporting
- Auto-generated analysis and chart recommendations
- Automated visual recommendations
- Group sharing and collaboration
- Drag-and-drop report and dashboard creation
- NLP capabilities
- Smart search
- Row- and column-level security
- Mobile support
- Embedded analytics
Pricing
Standard plan
from $825 per month
Premium plan
from $2,500 per month
Enterprise price
custom pricing is available upon direct request to the vendor
Free trial
Limitations
- Qlik Cloud has limitations on the size of tables that can be processed, the number of reports that can be generated, and the number of recipients for report distribution.
Key features
- Seamless integration with multiple SQL databases and data warehouses, including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift
- Customizable code blocks for building data analytics models
- Predictive analytics and big data services
- Embedded analytics
- LookML for organizing unprocessed data for analysis
- Self-service capabilities (pivoting, filtering, dashboard creation, data visualization, data discovery and search)
- Extensive library of visualization options
- Vast reporting capabilities, including scorecards and dashboards
- Scheduled reporting
- Collaboration tools
- NLQ interface
- Mobile support
- Multicloud support (Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS)
- Authentication, activity tracking, access controls to databases, rows and/or columns, role-based permissions
Pricing
Custom pricing
available upon direct request
Free trial
Limitations
- Can be expensive for small teams
- A steep learning curve
- Power user skills required for data modeling
Key features
- Vast data integration capabilities through out-of-the-box gateways, drivers, and custom data connectors
- Basic self-service data preparation and data analytics capabilities
- Data discovery, wrangling, and visualization
- Voice-enabled assistant integration and natural language processing
- AI-driven contextual insights
- Interactive dashboards and scorecards with pre-built grids, graphs, charts, and map templates
- Scheduled report distribution
- Collaboration and sharing
- Mobile support
- Cloud, on-premises, hybrid deployment
- Offered as SaaS on Microsoft Azure and AWS
Pricing
Essential plan
$1,250 per month
Pro and Enterprise plans
are custom-priced
Free trial
Limitations
- Limited data preparation capabilities
- Large datasets or complex queries can sometimes impact performance
Marketing BI software selection checklist
The BI software market is mature, so while choosing an optimal marketing BI platform, companies can be selective and rely on their unique needs and goals. Modern BI platforms support a full analytics workflow and are easy to use due to self-service BI capabilities and augmented analytics.
Here is the list of critical capabilities you should look for in a BI solution for marketing:
- Vast data source connectivity to connect to and ingest marketing data in various formats from multiple storage platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud
- Complex data models support for comprehensive marketing analytics
- Self-service data preparation for combining marketing data from various sources and creating analytic models without IT teams’ help
- ML-based analytics for automatically generating analytics insights for marketing departments
- Natural language generation and data querying for describing marketing insights found in data and querying data with business terms
- Data visualization, including the support of common chart forms (bar/column, line/area, pie, and geographic maps) as well as highly interactive dashboards
- Reporting capabilities to distribute reports to groups and individuals on a scheduled, on-demand, and subscription basis
- Highly interactive dashboards and visual data exploration
- Embedded analytics capabilities to seamlessly integrate valuable insights into the marketing process
- Security capabilities for user administration and authentication and platform access audit
- Data governance for managing and controlling marketing data flows
- Data catalogs to quickly access the required analytics content
- Cloud support
Need to choose optimal technology for your marketing BI project?
6 reasons for investing in BI for marketing
Effective marketing campaigns
BI tools help marketing specialists measure promotion effectiveness and identify strategies that work best, as well as areas of improvement for low-selling products, and effectively execute their upsell and cross-sell campaigns.
Enhanced customer experience
Comprehensive omnichannel customer insights delivered by BI software empower marketing teams to provide tailored offerings to the target audience, personalize every customer interaction, and deliver the best customer experience to increase customer loyalty and CLV.
Targeted demographics
BI software enables effective customer segmentation and accurate customer lifetime value tracking, helping marketers focus on the most profitable customers, timely identify new customer segments, and retain high-value customers.
Optimized marketing spend
BI tools can identify how advertisements, promotional activities, and executed marketing campaigns influence the bottom line. This way, marketing teams can implement the most effective marketing activities and identify areas where marketing teams can cut costs.
Improved user productivity
By automating manual, repetitive tasks (data inputting and cleansing, report generation), marketers can prevent inefficiency bottlenecks, prioritize critical business workflows, and have more time for high-priority activities.
Enhanced data security and compliance
Integrated data security and governance capabilities help marketing specialists identify where business data resides, track data workflows, and control data access according to user roles to prevent data loss, manipulation, and sensitive data exposure.
Common marketing BI adoption challenges & how to handle them
Data quality issues
Low-quality data that contains duplicates, errors, and inconsistencies complicates and slows down the analytics process and compromises the validity of results.
Data quality issues
Low-quality data that contains duplicates, errors, and inconsistencies complicates and slows down the analytics process and compromises the validity of results.
Set up a comprehensive data quality management process that helps mitigate data risks:
- Appoint a dedicated committee to manage the process of data quality management.
- Establish an effective data quality framework in line with the company's data quality objectives.
- Adopt data quality management software to automate data profiling, standardization, and transformation.
- Ensure that employees working with data understand the importance of proper data quality and actively participate in data quality management activities.
Self-service BI issues
Self-service tools used without relevant expertise and precaution lead to sensitive data exposure, uncontrolled software deployments, high licensing costs, and inaccurate analytics insights.
Self-service BI issues
Self-service tools used without relevant expertise and precaution lead to sensitive data exposure, uncontrolled software deployments, high licensing costs, and inaccurate analytics insights.
Before implementing self-service BI software, establish a solid data governance strategy. To minimize data security risks and ensure the analytics insights are viable, consider implementing effective data security tools and procedures:
- Role-based data access and multi-factor user authentication
- Dynamic data masking, end-to-end encryption, and sensitive data labeling
- Continuous user activity monitoring
- Regular risk and vulnerability assessments
- Complete data audit trail
User adoption issues
After BI implementation, end users continue using familiar tools, making new functionality and improved data capabilities useless.
User adoption issues
After BI implementation, end users continue using familiar tools, making new functionality and improved data capabilities useless.
To improve the chances of BI marketing initiatives for success, develop a change management strategy, which includes activities that help address your personnel’s concerns and prepare them for the change:
- Change readiness assessment to gauge how well the company will handle forthcoming changes to systems, processes, organizational structure, roles, and responsibilities.
- Custom training for end users to help them obtain the necessary BI skills and experience.
- Communication plans aimed at explaining the benefits of business intelligence software and how to navigate the new BI environment.
- Communication channels to timely support end users, continuously monitor user activity and feedback and timely identify adoption problems and user resistance.
BI implementation cost factors
Data sources – their number, integration flexibility, deployment environment
Data for analysis – its volume, refresh frequency, structure, variability, and format
Initial data quality and data quality requirements
Data storage layer complexity, particularly the availability of an enterprise data warehouse, data marts, and complementary data storage
Data analytics complexity, including the number of entities, data flow complexity, ML and AI tools, analytics streaming, and real-time data analytics
Data visualization and reporting requirements, including embedded reporting, self-service BI, and custom visualization
Mobile support
Data security and compliance requirements
Cost factors
BI services we offer
With over 15 years in the business intelligence domain, we provide a full range of BI services that enable professionals to gain a better understanding of their target audience, create personalized campaigns, and optimize marketing spend.
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Implement BI for data-driven marketing
Since marketing has become increasingly data-driven, BI is a staple for marketing specialists. Companies use analytics insights derived from BI software across industries to streamline the decision-making process, spot marketing trends, design successful marketing campaigns, increase customer loyalty, and generate high ROI. Still, BI implementation is wrought with numerous challenges. So if you want to get an effective marketing BI solution that gives your company a competitive advantage from the get-to, consider hiring Itransition for assistance.
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