The Role of Business Intelligence in Marketing Analytics

Introduction

With the rapid advancements in technology, business becomes easier and effective day by day. The reviews of the present strategy and the prediction of the future trends in commerce are the primary roles of Marketing Analytics.

Anything in life comes with the concept of learning from mistakes. Here, the business is not an exception. Learning from the experiences of successes and failures is the thriving mantra of business. Traders should keep track of their works, record their hits and flops with reasons and observe the impact of their work. These manual works are automated using Business Intelligence that retrieves the data, analyses, generate reports and makes predictions.

How can we define Marketing Analytics?

Data-centric Approach in Marketing Analytics:

The web is flooded with data. Every single click of the users is pieces of information to the commercial marketers. The likes and interests of the people are predicted with the sites they open, the time they spend on them and the links they further click and get into. The metrics of likes, views, downloads and their clicks serve as the input for Marketing Analytics that analyses and predicts the reach the commerce have among the public.

Social Media - Integral part of today' business.

Social Media is the data bank of Business Intelligence from which the information of people' interests and needs are collected and further processed. Social Media is the platform where the customers, general public and entrepreneurs meet.

Social Media is used by both already established businesses and upcoming entrepreneurs. The former with the support of Business Intelligence reads peoples mindset to update their trade while the latter uses this to publicise their product/service by interacting and reaching to people.

Social Media and Business Intelligence

Acts as an advertising portal:

Social Media acts as a platform for both well-developed businesses and upcoming entrepreneurs to advertise their products or services. People get easily attracted to the advertisements that pop on their screen.

Also used as a feedback system:

Through the people' response to those advertisements, Business Intelligence uses itsdata collection techniquesand analyses the trend among the public. The interests and expectations of the general public are analysed to evolve the business in a way to match people' requirements.

Marketing Analytics:

Marketing Analytics is the process of evaluating the performance and the effort done by the marketers. The close analysis of the business metrics like the number of visits on the websites and orders placed are considered to predict the ROI (Return of Marketing Investment) of the system.

In e-commerce, performance is considered to be equally important to that of results. The frequency and consistency are the prominent factors in e-commerce. The number of times we post something regarding our business, how often we interact with people through activities, the success rate of our ideas and the resultant response through the call to actions (CTA) from the customer side are the basic metrics to analyse and predict the upcoming trend. This helps sellers to get a clear picture of the approach they should implement in future.

Why Business Intelligence?

The one with good business ideas may not necessarily be good in marketing skills. People nowadays are skilled in certain fields but all of them cannot channel it as a business. Their efforts sway at times and other times they don't.

In this case, the commercial marketers should have certain bits of knowledge like,

• Converting the data dumped in front of them into clear information.

• Differentiating the worked out and failed strategies.

• Analysing the reason for success and failures.

• Classify the ideas concerning time, place and type of audience.

These are some of the skills which are not possessed by all the people who wish to launch their business. Here, Business Intelligence comes into the picture as a handy assistant. Business Intelligence automates all these processes like analysis, insights and reports generations and predictions.

Business Intelligence in Marketing Analytics:

Business Intelligence comes with some splendid technologies that address the various problems encountered by humans.

Centralized Data Warehousing:

Data is being generated in million numbers with rocketing speed for every passing second. Thus the lump of data we have will be of various forms like structured or unstructured and they will be collected from various fields.

For example, the data collection for a textile business may be in the forms of pictures or videos of materials. The customer and purchase details can be predicted either in tabular for or text form.

These data of different forms and from different fields may be collected in a big repository. The data with the history of past years and the present fresh data are collected in a single place. With these data as trained sets, testing will be performed to predict future trends. This technique suits well for the big organizations which have been operating for many years. Any details of past or present can be retrieved from these warehouses.

User Interface - Dashboards:

The dashboard is the most attractive and easily understandable form of the user interface. This dashboard has separate entities for every field that are designed in engaging ways to make it user friendly.

For example: In textile shopping, there are separate entities for every single category like for the materials sold online or offline, the income through them, the stock availability, the average selling rate, monthly and annual profit. All these are evaluated and displayed on respective boards in the form of charts, tables or reports.

The main advantage is that these dashboards are directly connected making it convenient to self-update the user interface with the newer information fed into the system. This dashboard prevails easy access and a better understanding.

Specific data access through ad-hoc reports:

This technology is something related to dashboards. The difference is here one can be more specific about the data they wish to retrieve. The word ad-hoc means this. As the name implies this technology is specialized in letting the users directly access the exact information they wish to see. The users are allowed to access and enquire about their specific needs.

For example: Instead of displaying all the details as shown in the dashboard, the user can see only what they want. Like, the manager can use the filter option to see the stock available only within a certain price range.

Benefits of Ad-hoc reporting:

• User-level Access: Ad-hoc reporting allows users to find details one's own without making any programmatic changes. The queries and results can be performed even at the user interface level.

• Tolerance to self-edits:Apart from direct access, the user can make some edits which they wish to bring in the report presentation.

• Easy adaptability:The information can be accessed from any device like phones, tabs or personal computers. They can also be accessible through apps or webs irrespective of the platforms.

• Flexible interactivity:Ad-hoc reporting also provides options of filer, sort, add and many more.

• Portable reports: The whole report or a part of the whole report can be saved as pdfs or could be attached and shared as links.

Knowledge Discovery and pattern analysis:

This function comes with the possibility of discovering the pattern. After gathering various data, analysing them and concluding the result we can find the pattern in which the business moves on with profitable output. This discovery of the trend by which the business is benefitted is the Data Discovery of Pattern analysis method.

For example:

By collecting the data of the textile showroom the sales rate can be calculated. By close analysis of these reports, the analyst can understand the sales rate on a particular season or time when the sales rate is high. Annual vacations, weekends and the time between evenings to late nights could have high sales rates. Thus from this pattern, the marketing team can devise plans to provide offers during non-vacation days to improve the sales.

Cloud Storage:

This cloud storage is an advanced technology of Business Intelligence. The data stored either in tables or presented as pictorial graphs are done in secondary or primary memory. Here, the resource collection and storage, access of information, sharing the resources, managing an entire organization in the form of enterprise all are done through cloud storage. This storage method is easily accessible. An analyst or merchant can retrieve the data of any fields from this cloud, store the information processed from distinct zones to this common cloud and generate the report and conclusion in this cloud. This reduces memory storage, enhances the accessibility speed and free from data-theft threats

Business Intelligence Tools:

• Power BI

• Oracle Analytics

• Micro Strategy

• SpotFire SAS Visual Analytics

• Domo

• Sisense

These are the top BI tools of the market that assists business entrepreneurs in Marketing Analytics.