Over the years, as businesses expanded into new marketing categories, new technologies were adopted to support them. But, because, each new technology was typically deployed in isolation, the result was various disconnected data environments.

Consequently, marketers often made decisions based on data from individual channels like digital marketing and website metrics, not taking into account the 360-degree marketing picture. Social media and web analytics data alone is not enough. And the tools that look at just a single channel are woefully inadequate.

To overcome these challenges thus, marketing analytics was adopted.

Marketing analytics essentially comprises of the processes that enable the marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives by gathering data from different marketing channels. This is accomplished by measuring performance with the help of important business metrics, like ROI, marketing attribution and overall marketing effectiveness.

What you can do with marketing analytics

With marketing analytics, a few important questions mentioned below can be answered:

• The performance of marketing initiatives and the ways to improve them
• Analysing the competitors
• Planning the future moves
• Analysing ROI

Marketing KPI’s

1. Sales Growth 

The best way to judge marketing’s success is by measuring its growth in sales revenue at the end of the day. Measuring the marketing’s effect on sales growth helps to weed out the strategies and processes that drive sales. Measuring sales growth is also vital to the long-term health of a company. Not only does it serve as a great indicator when it comes to strategic planning, but it also allows for the identification of growth trends.

• Website Traffic to Website Lead Ratio

This simply refers to the website visitors and how many of them converted and became leads. This KPI is helps to measure two things:

• The quality of the web-site’s traffic and
• The conversion rate of the website

• Website Traffic

Getting to understand the website traffic is about finding some information about the users like:

• Who these people are,
• Where they’re from and
• What did they do after getting to the site?

All of this information can help to determine an important piece of information, i.e., what it is they want and knowing the potential customer’s and their needs is what marketing is all about.

• Social Media Reach and Engagement

Social media strategy is a huge part of the inbound marketing efforts because it allows the organisations to interact with their current and potential customers.

A good way to judge this KPI is to track the social media growth and engagement and most of the social media sites have built-in tracking and analysis that makes it incredibly easy to generate the website metrics.

• Email Marketing Performance

The email marketing strategy is essentially an organisations lifeline to its customer and analysing it is multifaceted. The email marketing strategy includes its own set of KPIs that should be dissected each on their own merits. Examples include:

• Delivery Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Open Rate
• Click-Through Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Forward/Shares

• Landing Page Conversions

If the landing pages on a website are not drawing people in and converting them then, they are a total waste of effort and time. A good way to judge whether or not the landing pages are working is to assess the number of people who visit them and whether the organisations CTAs are converting them.

Use of Business Intelligence in Marketing

In a survey conducted by MiQ among marketers in the US and the UK, it was found that:

• 43% of the marketers considered the cost of advanced data science as the biggest challenge to investing in it
• Another 39% said interpreting data was a roadblock
• And 38% believe they simply lack the resources to analyse volumes and volumes of data.

And this is where business intelligence comes into the picture.

Business intelligence provides accurate insights for better decision-making and optimisation and the benefits of business intelligence in marketing are discussed below.

1. Targeted Demographics and Better Audience Profiling

A large number of marketing campaigns fail because marketers have only the vaguest idea of who they are targeting and why and they burn money on running campaign after campaign without even knowing the KPIs they’re aiming for.

But, for the marketing initiatives to bring about results, the campaigns should be able to send the desired message to the right people at the right time using the right channels and this is where business intelligence comes in. BI helps to organise data into the multi-channel stream, giving the marketers the power to efficiently build strategies around them and imagine useful conclusions for their campaigns. 

• Optimised Marketing Campaigns

Using a business intelligence tool, campaigns performance can be tracked and analysed in real-time and can even be compared against the historical patterns.

This comparative analysis provides the benefit of deciding how to shuffle the marketing budgets and funnel it to promotional activities that give the highest returns on investment to the marketers.

• Speedier Reporting Process and Quality Insights

A good business intelligence dashboard precisely addresses the problem of slow reporting processes by allowing them to visualise their data right off the bat and even recommending remedial or reactive strategies. Thus, with a speedier reporting process, marketing professionals won’t also have to waste time reconciling data streams and generating the desired reports.

Benefits of BI for a Marketing Manager (for company)

1. Ask the right questions

For the marketing managers, it’s vital to not simply ask questions but also to pose the right ones and one of the benefits of BI is the ability to sort through massive amounts of data and generate actionable insights from it, thereby, helping the managers to understand and answer the right questions.

• Look at the right data

With a huge amount of information at their disposal, the marketing department may face a challenge to determine the metrics that are important for their marketing department. Business intelligence, however, can help the managers to look at the right data to determine the strengths and weaknesses that may shape new initiatives and lead to improvements in site conversions and an uptick in sales.

• Predictive and prescriptive analytics

Predictive analytics is the process of uncovering data that reveals future trends and BI Predictive analytics tools can determine the different marketing strategies for different segments of customers by reading into their past behaviour accurately by helping the marketers to understand customer behaviour better.

• Marketing technology integration

Marketing technology integration is about conveying a unified message throughout a customer’s entire experience with a brand: from email and social media to billboards and in-store advertisements and business intelligence tools can contribute significantly to a fully integrated marketing approach by helping integrating data from all available platforms to design ideal interactions.