You can collect essential data in web analytics tools, Marketing Automation tools, a CRM or a Business Intelligence platform. Thinking about the work of the Marketing area, one of those that most benefit from BI, the tools provide relevant data such as:
- the inflow of website visitors;
- pages with the best conversions;
- your Lead takes paths;
- consumption patterns;
- their location;
- the times they consumed;
- what is your company’s conversion rate;
- which items were purchased together.
Much of this data can also be collected in your Marketing and Sales teams’ internal quarterly reports. To facilitate the analysis of the collected data and transform them into insights, it is interesting to use programs that allow you to put data in graphical ways. For this, Excel is recommended and Rapid Miner, which allows for a more complete cross-referencing and analysis of data. We cannot forget that you can also obtain relevant data through customer and ex-customer surveys and benchmarking, among other sources.
What Data Should I Collect For Business Intelligence?
The great insight of BI is to provide subsidies so that strategic and planning decisions are made less based on feeling and guesswork and more guided by data, which means decisions with a smaller margin of error. So the type of data you should collect depends on what’s essential to your business. It would help analyze which information and channels are relevant to your strategy. And that changes depending on the sector, the size of the company and even the possibilities of personnel you have.
The geographic issue, for example, can be essential for an eCommerce that deals with logistics. This may not be relevant for a software company that only operates in one city. The same goes for the activity area of Leads who have not yet become customers, age, consumption behavior (both visits to pages and purchase history and schedules), and position, among other items. Remember, it’s essential to do data analysis at least quarterly to revalidate and drive your BI strategies.
How To Structure A BI Analysis
A good BI analysis goes through four critical factors:
- What’s happening?
- Why is it happening?
- What will happen now?
- How can we change or improve what is happening?
For example, your marketing analyst does data analysis and notices that interactions on your company’s Instagram page are dropping. That’s a given. Now begins the research to verify which factors were responsible for this event – which will turn this data into information and can allow efficient action, such as:
- change posting times ;
- review the contents that are being disseminated;
- work more campaigns to boost posts.
Through BI, it is also possible to verify behavior trends for the next months or years and allow a more effective preparation for changes. This is also an excellent way to point out bottlenecks that will arise and work so that they don’t hamper the scalability of your business.
How To Use Business Intelligence To Improve The Performance Of A Digital Marketing Strategy
Marketing is at the heart of the customer acquisition and revenue generation machine. This represents a significant challenge for managers and marketing analysts, whose mission is to generate and demonstrate continuous growth for their businesses. One of the significant differences (and advantages) between Digital Marketing about traditional marketing is the possibility of your actions being measured. This means that you can precisely know which campaigns were most effective, which path your leads take before becoming customers, which content is most interesting to your company’s persona, and the bottlenecks in your sales strategy.
All of this comes in the form of data, which needs to be analyzed and transformed into insights for competitive intelligence. In other words, we need to change the raw data that various platforms and tools provide us, work with them until they become relevant information and then insights, and then use them to improve Inbound Marketing strategies.
There is a significant impact that minor optimizations in Marketing work have in the long term. By improving by just 10% month after month some part of our sales funnel, at the end of a year, we managed to have a 213% bigger operation, and at the end of three years, it is possible to grow 30 times! This evolution happens without magic, but with discipline in monitoring data using Business Intelligence, with planning and implementing continuous and incremental improvements based on the data generated by your operation.
Marketing BI As The Way To Analyzing Your Performance
RD Station Marketing implemented Marketing BI thinking about supporting operations that depend on a more in-depth analysis of data. This analysis functionality has everything companies need to achieve their goal of transforming Marketing data into accurate information.
With this functionality, you can:
- Create custom reports with flexibility and customization to create your custom reports;
- Check all the planning, results and performance of the Sales Funnel;
- Understand the results and performance of Leads acquisition channels;
- Monitor the performance of marketing actions in the funnel conversion.
More than an analysis tool, Marketing BI is a robust analysis. It results in a demonstration framework, from the business layer with important information for the strategic level of the company to the Channels and Campaigns layers.
Having this data integration allows Marketing managers and analysts to understand how their Digital Marketing operation works and the main problems and opportunities for improvement. Even if your operation requires a short follow-up, the first step to creating a structure capable of generating relevant returns is to start implementing a complete Digital Marketing strategy.
