Role of Business Intelligence in Marketing and Its Benefits

Business intelligence is the use of business analytics by organisations that provide data mining, data interpretation, and data management to provide users with important actionable information from raw data. The data is refined by the data scientist to depict a clear view of significant data by using various statistics and analytical tools. Such information helps in making decisions that are significant for companies. Business intelligence as technology enables information collection, storage, and analysing it for better decision-making. It helps in converting the data into information, information conversion to knowledge, and making decisions for the organisation.

The objective of business intelligence is to make better decisions for the business by seeking accurate information at the right time, which results in improving organisation revenue and also providing for overall business efficiency that gives businesses a competitive edge over its competitors.

Business intelligence Use in Marketing

Tools in Business Intelligence are used for analysing the data collected from customers at each visit. The information collected from customers is used for forming strategies and plans for various marketing campaigns. Data is transformed into meaningful information that can be used for making quick decisions. Marketing teams can use data to utilise the information; business intelligence enables them to make the right decision at the right time. Through business intelligence personalised strategies for sales are designed, which is essential in the competitive world.

Business Intelligence Benefits:

1. Improve Business Performance

Business intelligence offers greater insights into information by representing data in a graphical format, which enables a better understanding of information and taking proper decisions on time for better business performance by achieving higher sales.

2. Competitive Edge Over Competitors

Businesses tend to be more competitive when they have knowledge about the market and its performance in the industry. Business intelligence helps businesses to remain updated about the market changes, customer needs at different intervals, trends in the industry, and the impact of seasonal changes on business.

3. Highly Trusted and Accurate Data

Data is highly organised and customised as per the business needs. The reports offering data help in making timely decisions from accurate data. The report provides for accurate insights, access, and reliability of the facts.

4. Depicting Buyer Behaviour and Market Trends

Software used by the business intelligence process provides for a better understanding of customer profiles, their needs, and preferences. Every feedback by customer during visit helps to give an understanding of buyer behaviour, their complaints, liking and disliking. It helps in making strategies for a future action plan.

5. Increase in Productivity

Business Intelligence can remove various bottlenecks of manual tasks and old techniques of doing work. This can provide automation in working, which increases the productivity of organisations. It enables optimum utilisation of resources in an organisation that provides for greater production and response to customer needs.

6. Customer Satisfaction

Business intelligence assists in understanding the needs of individual clients and meeting their needs accordingly. Regular customer feedback is analysed through BI software and updates in the process are done to incorporate new customer needs and demand as per the latest trends.

7. Saves Time and Makes Quick Decisions

Companies extract factual information from large, unorganised data. An analysis is done at a high speed through business intelligence. Availability of relevant data helps in making timely and quick decisions.

8. Increase in ROI

Business Intelligence in companies leads to an increase in ROI. It manages everyday tasks, sorts information, enables effective decisions that generate increased returns. Customer experience can also be judged through these techniques.

Business Intelligence Types:

• Ad Hoc Analysis

Ad hoc analysis provides for one time reports as per needs, it helps clients in getting answers to their critical queries immediately by creating a report as per their demand fulfilling the requirement. Ad hoc reporting is important for the businesses; it offers deeper insights into the business. This Analysis is essential for business growth.

• Business Intelligence in Mobile

With the advent of wireless technology, data analysis has been shifted to smart phones, which aids users to make effective decisions and support related activities. Mobile business intelligence is a combination of historical data and real time data, which is delivered to users on mobile devices either in forms of push methods, by mobile browsers or by mobile apps, which are specifically developed for the purpose.

• Online Analytical Processing

This is a type of computing technology, where users have options to view and analyse data from different points. At the highest level, data is sourced from multiple systems, collected, cleaned and projected in the form of informational data cubes. Users can query these data cubes and perform various kinds of operations like data roll up, drill down, pivot, slice and dice, which enable users to view data from multiple points.

• Real-Time Business Intelligence

It is the process of syncing and sharing the information as the event occurs in real time. The information is shared from transaction systems to data ware and all related data activities are performed on a near real-time basis. Such systems are very helpful for business houses as early decisions help them to have an edge in a competitive market.

• Operational Intelligence

This is a collection of tools which rely on data feeds and sharing real time information to business users. The main difference between real-time business intelligence and operational intelligence is the source, i.e. where underlying data is the source for real time BI, relevant events are the source for OI.

• SaaS Business Intelligence

SaaS based tools are the provision of business computing systems hosted on the cloud. This kind of arrangement enables organisations to deploy the business intelligence tool on a cloud system, instead of hosting on an on-premises system. This type of setup not only saves cost and time, but also avoids vendor dependencies.

• Open Source

It is a type of tool which is available in open source libraries. This type of application is available in two forms, either in community edition which is totally free of cost for end users or another release with a cost-based model for vendor support. Since the tools are open source, the source code is also available for business intelligence teams for further development.

• Embedded Business Intelligence

It is the inclusion of business intelligence solutions in the business portals itself. This kind of setup helps business users to analyse and visualise the data, as they do the normal business-related transactions.

• Locational Intelligence

This is a map-based visualisation, which helps users to analyse data in line with locations. It is adding different forms of geographic data which encompasses weather conditions, demographics, traffic available at the dashboard to make various analytical decisions.

To Conclude

Business intelligence in marketing is significant, as it helps companies in getting a viewpoint by comparing various historical and present data. Using this as software helps in reaping benefits from Business Intelligence by depicting buyer behaviour, increasing customer satisfaction, increased returns, increased productivity. Business intelligence makes data useful to get deeper insights into the data to make effective decisions.