Businesses now have access to extensive data on the identity, behaviour, or preferences of their customers. Therefore, BI, It’s becoming increasingly important to exploit this data to improve marketing and sales performance.
Implement a data-driven marketing strategy
Data-driven marketing refers to a strategy in which every decision is based on data. In other words, the company exploits the massive amount of data at its disposal to produce statistics and forecasts that will help it define its strategic objectives.
The benefits of such a strategy are numerous, starting with improved customer experience. In an era where consumers are overwhelmed with advertisements, targeting marketing campaigns becomes a real priority. Data-driven marketing allows companies to analyse and predict customer behaviour. As a result, companies can send relevant messages to their customers using the right channels at the right time.
Data is a real mine of information about your customers: sociodemographic data, preferences, interests… Customer knowledge that can be very valuable.
Mining data to improve customer knowledge
Data mining, also known as data exploration, refers to a set of techniques used to analyse large volumes of data. Objective: identifying relevant information from raw data to support decision-making.
Thus, mining data facilitates better interpretation, even when it comes from a wide variety of channels: social media, customer relationship management (CRM) software, website, application… A practice that considerably increases customer knowledge.
As a result, data mining can target customers with unprecedented precision by taking into account a multitude of factors: demographics, price, product positioning, economic conditions, competition, etc. In conclusion, customer knowledge is an invaluable tool for predicting future market trends thanks to predictive analysis.
Improved strategic foresight thanks to marketing intelligence
While marketers are familiar with strategic foresight, it is a rather passive approach to monitoring the company’s environment to better understand its market. Marketing intelligence goes further with its proactive approach, aiming at identifying new elements unknown until now.
Market intelligence makes it possible to combine a multitude of data from various sources in one place. A user-friendly and intuitive decision dashboard, accessible from all media, facilitates the analysis of data from social media, web analytics or mailing software.
Moreover, this data can be cross-referenced to send targeted proposals to customers according to their profile. It is therefore a powerful tool for identifying new sales opportunities, particularly in the context of a cross-selling strategy.
Reconciling the marketing and sales departments with Business Intelligence
Collaboration between the marketing and sales departments is crucial to build an effective sales strategy and optimize the sales cycle in the long term. However, reconciling these two departments is often a major challenge for companies.
Business Intelligence tools are a powerful driver for reconciling marketing and sales teams around common objectives, starting with sales growth. For example, it is possible to implement shared indicators such as sales conversion rate, average revenue per customer or sales cycle.
In addition, BI is an excellent tool for creating bridges between personal customer data (name, e-mail, etc.), generally stored in CRM software, and browsing data (cookies) from websites and apps. This is a major challenge when it comes to launching more relevant marketing campaigns, but also helping sales staff to have a better knowledge of the customer base.
Integrating a Business Intelligence solution to monitor sales performance
Just like the marketing department, the sales department must be able to rely on powerful tools in order to achieve maximum sales and reach its revenue objectives. Business Intelligence can provide a better insight into the market, but also support the company in its day-to-day decision-making.
In particular, the company can set up personalized indicators and alerts to identify problems before they occur, but also to immediately seize sales opportunities that arise. A Business Intelligence solution is also an excellent data visualization tool that allows data to be represented in the form of pivot tables, gauge charts, diagrams or even maps.
In addition, BI facilitates the cross-referencing of sales data with marketing or financial data, resulting in richer and more qualitative information. This data can then be easily transformed into key performance indicators (KPI): conversion rate, customer retention rate, churn rate, etc.
From the implementation of a data-driven marketing strategy to the monitoring of sales performance and the increase of customer knowledge, Business Intelligence has a lot to offer to the sales and marketing departments.
