It’s a new, labyrinthine world for digital marketers to navigate. One that is driven by connection and intelligence. If the introduction of smartphone devices into the playing field was monumental, there’s significantly more disruption on the way. The cause? Data. Immeasurable troves of it.
Consider these statistics. In a given minute on the internet, Google tallies 3.7 million queries, Facebook has one million logins, and YouTube streams 4.5 million videos. The world spends almost $1 billion every 60 seconds on commodities online. Every day, 500 million tweets are sent out on Twitter. Embedded within all of these actions and activities are lucrative insights marketers can utilize to reach their target audiences more effectively. With so much data to report and act on, though, where do modern marketers even begin with their analysis?
The answer lies in marketing intelligence platforms.
So, What Are Marketing Intelligence Platforms?
At their core, marketing intelligence platforms are data consolidation and empowerment systems. They offer all the integrations businesses need to process data, whether it comes from web analytics, business intelligence systems, back-end databases, advertising platforms, call centers, etc. What makes these solutions so important today is their power to centralize all relevant marketing data in one single location and their capacity to fuel business growth by exposing powerful actionable insights at the deepest levels of granularity. Rather than relying on a whole team of expert data scientists to process and analyze billions of data points, a marketing intelligence platform can do this automatically, in real-time.
The Key Benefits of Investing in Marketing Intelligence
Insights into performance from every angle. Unparalleled visibility into market trends. Full knowledge of campaign ROI. The benefits of using a marketing intelligence platform are profound. Here’s why.
A better understanding of the customer journey
The customer journey today is not as linear as it once was. There are numerous touchpoints at each of the awareness, acquisition, and conversion stages that can influence your audience and encourage them to buy. There’s your website, social media, paid advertisements, and third-party websites, not to mention radio, television, print, phones, and point-of-sale interactions. A decade ago, it was much easier to track a few audience engagements and understand how campaigns were performing. Today, with the sheer amount of data involved, it’s infinitely more challenging and complex. Even if you have the software capabilities to track all your interactions by channel, there are still issues with having your data in disparate silos.
This is where marketing intelligence platforms thrive. In view of having all your relevant data housed in a single location, it’s possible to gain a complete overarching picture of the specific journeys your customers are taking. Once you achieve this clarity, you can begin to uncover a multitude of optimization opportunities that would have otherwise gone undetected when you had blind spots in your tracking setup. This is mission-critical in the drive to produce meaningful ROI and game-changing business growth.
Improved customer experience
This unbroken transparency into the customer journey also empowers you with the opportunity to improve how your business relates to your desired audience, whether you’re nurturing leads, driving sales, or handling customer service inquiries. Understanding which tactics are resonating most with prospects will help you to adapt and deliver the experiences they want and expect.
Marketing intelligence platforms can incorporate marketing and sales data together, and therefore it’s easy to streamline how these two teams work together and consequently enhance cross-team alignment. Incorporating all your operations and inventory data can further lead to the extraction of new insights that can augment internal processes and help your business to become more efficient and helpful for customers. You can also analyze this in conjunction with your CRM data, which allows you to determine what factors influence retention, customer service issues, and churn. You can then make targeted changes to improve retention and the overall customer experience.
Access to advanced reporting and bespoke dashboards
With marketing intelligence platforms, you can dissect your campaigns in ways that were previously unfeasible. You can connect data sources that were once totally isolated and begin to pinpoint patterns imperceptible to the naked eye and identify the real driving forces behind performance. Imagine discovering that messaging and creative that you thought would strike a chord with audience segment A was actually resonating more acutely with audience segment B. Understanding how to communicate with your respective target groups will naturally help you drive smarter and more efficient advertising investments that will, ultimately, maximize your profitability.
The most advanced solutions on the market go one step further and offer the capability to design custom dashboards tailored precisely to your business needs. The ROI gained from dashboards is undoubtedly greatest when you are empowered to set-up defined components that provide all the information and statistics you require to make needle-moving decisions. Clearly the more refined and insightful your dashboard analytics are, the more penetrating intelligence your evaluations will yield.
Transform your focus from management to growth
Whether or not you have automated technologies in your marketing stack, a great deal of time is likely to be consumed by data management and analysis all the same. You have to incorporate different data sources, validate the data, run analyses, summarize insights, and then make targeted changes to your marketing campaigns.
Best-in-class marketing intelligence platforms employ artificial intelligence to discover new insights for you. This affords data analysts and other marketing team members an opportunity to reinvest their time and energy into testing new campaign optimizations or exploring targeting opportunities that can really move the needle. Marketing teams that are bogged down by data management and analysis are never able to truly focus on growth initiatives like this.
Marketing Intelligence Platforms: An Option or a Necessity?
Marketing intelligence platforms have enough benefits to make them appealing to many businesses. That said, if past changes to the marketing landscape teach us anything, they’re quickly becoming a necessity as opposed to simply an option.
Look at what happened with marketing automation technologies within the last 10 years. In the beginning, email marketing and social media automation tools seemed like a worthwhile option for marketers. Now, businesses couldn’t operate without these tools to optimize their campaigns. Here are some telltale signs that marketing intelligence platforms are on the same route of adoption.
Omnichannel marketing is the new standard
15 years ago, the average consumer interacted with a business using only two touchpoints before making a purchase. Now, that average has escalated to nearly six touchpoints. Consumers interact with businesses in a complex way – what’s more, they’ve come to expect a seamless experience when engaging with businesses across different channels and platforms.
Omnichannel marketing is the strategy that caters to this need. Doing so effectively is only possible if you have a full picture of the customer journey and you’re analyzing data from all relevant online and offline sources. Marketing intelligence technologies provide the solution, illustrating customer journeys that will only become more complex in the years to come.
Big data isn’t going anywhere
As we’ve established, people are already generating an unfathomable amount of personal data each and every day. People and their various devices are becoming more interconnected, not less. Even with new consumer privacy laws in place, marketers have a significant amount of relevant consumer data to work with and learn from.
That’s not about to change any time soon. In fact, the global business intelligence market is expected to reach $29.48 billion by 2022. As more relevant consumer and competitor data are made available to businesses, the more essential marketing intelligence platforms will become to manage and leverage it all.
Your competitors are already investing
The global economy has made competition online tougher than ever. A decade ago, many businesses only competed with regional or national markets. Now they have competition from eCommerce and service companies across the world, including Europe, China, and other emerging economies.
Today, it’s simply not enough to monitor local competitor tactics to inform your marketing decisions. You need to pay attention to the global landscape and adjust your strategy to earn your share of visibility online. This massive undertaking could easily become the full-time job of any data scientist. Marketing intelligence platforms offer an automated solution to empower the optimization of your advertising efforts based on the latest market trends, including changes in competitor bid strategy and investment.
Wrapping Up
The MarTech landscape is constantly changing and growing. Every few years there’s a new revolutionary “must-have” tool businesses need to keep up with the demands of the marketing landscape. In the case of marketing intelligence platforms, the need really is dire.
Businesses require a comprehensive system that can help them collect, manage, analyze, and act on all the most important data insights they need. You could do this by utilizing a number of related tools, but even then you’d have huge gaps in your analytics. A marketing intelligence platform is the only solution to this problem that will remain relevant and valuable in the long-term.
Many of the world’s most successful marketing organizations are utilizing QuanticMind’s own Marketing Intelligence Platform today. Our easy to set up, easy to use technology helps marketers – from start-ups to enterprises – unlock the power of their data and extract deep insights into the behaviors, and needs, of their target audiences. If you’re interested in having a look, don’t hesitate to reach out.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chaitanya Chandresekhar
Chaitanya Chandrasekar is CEO and a co-founder of QuanticMind, the platform for smarter advertising. Previously, he built and managed the traffic acquisition platform and was part of the Data Science team at NexTag. He strongly believes in the power of data technology, which can help decipher big data to unlock new ideas and opportunities.