In spite of the several benefits offered by business intelligence, many companies don’t use it in their online marketing. Well, business intelligence should work jointly with online marketing. In fact, business intelligence and online marketing are born to jointly work. Both the fields have been constructed on using data for making decisions, so as to optimize Return On Investment (ROI) and improve various processes. However, business intelligence is still an elusive concept for many companies, and it’s not at the top of their priority list.
However, once you understand how interdependent the two fields are, you will find it quite sensible to integrate them. There are several areas where, if the two disciplines work combined, can fetch great result
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AREAS WHERE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ONLINE MARKETING CAN WORK TOGETHER:
Listed below are five areas where you can integrate business intelligence with online marketing, to make your marketing strategies a success:
1. Advertising:
It is important to get data on target customers across online and offline platforms, to make campaigns more targeted. With business intelligence, companies can find out the behavior patterns of their audience across several media forms, like online, print, radio and television.
Knowing audience behavior is often the beginning point to design online advertisement campaigns. When the knowledge of audience behavior is implemented in online advertising, it usually generates quicker results as they are generally based on purchases made online, clicks and impressions. Offline advertisement campaigns can also benefit from instant data, as instant data gives an idea about the impact of new product advertisements, branding colors or a seasonal campaign.
2. Behavioral and Demographic Analysis:
Firms of business intelligence provide real-time analytics on the basis of online marketing efforts. Experts in business intelligence use structured analysis that can serve beneficial for search engine marketing as well as social media campaigns.
Search engine marketing gradually tends to take an analytical position, since several analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, offer a vast data now, which comprises user search behavior and basic demographics. For example, if your website’s 90% of American visitors visit a certain services or product page, then it’s quite sensible to develop further advertising and marketing for that specific service or product in the U.S.
By emphasizing more on data behind the online marketing campaigns, business intelligence reports are able to say how the bottom line is affected by the efforts of online marketing. Besides, data of social media engagement is an effective means to understand the overall demographics of users (their location, gender, age), who are most engaged online with a company. The raw social media data may seem to be overwhelming initially. However, analyzers of business intelligence generally make use of formulas and key metrics, which can filter as well as help you understand important information provided by social media.
Apart from demographic data, data on emotional pattern is also offered by social media, since behavior and comments on social media indicate brand sentiment. This data helps companies get an idea of what kind of feelings customers have about their brand.
3. Analysis and Research of Events:
When promotion of offline events is done online, it offers a good idea of customer patterns, thereby leading to a boost in effectiveness of event marketing. By knowing about the ways, location and time of customer interaction with ticketing of events, event planners can find out the best time for promoting events. They can also know about the event types that work well, and can adjust prices of tickets for optimizing sales.
It is possible to track the interaction of a customer right from the beginning to the end with the help of a proper online campaign of event marketing. This comprises the tracking of how customers got to know of the event, using metrics like custom promo codes, referral sites and entrance pages. One of the most effective ways online marketing and business intelligence can work jointly, is combining online marketing campaigns with promotions and events of the real world .
4. Content Strategy:
If business intelligence’s big data helps online marketers know about their target customers, then marketers will be able to find out what kind of online content brings maximum conversions and traffic. This will help the company find out what is it that interests its target audience the most. The company can then incorporate modifications in its content strategy accordingly.
Now that you know the areas where the two disciplines can work together, it would be good for you to know what business intelligence tools you should use. A few great open source tools for reporting and business intelligence are – BIRT, JasperReport and Pentaho.
USE OF GOOGLE INTELLIGENCE FOR ONLINE MARKETING:
Besides business intelligence, Google Intelligence can also work along with online marketing. It can help you in online marketing by offering you effective ways to track your website(s). All you need to do is set up a few custom alerts of Google Intelligence to track your site efficiently. Some of the custom alerts that would boost up your online marketing in the above areas, are:
- Traffic Drop:
If you find a huge drop in your traffic (say 50% from previous month), this alert would help you know about it. For small sites, you can run the alert once a month, whereas for more consistent and bigger sites, run it once a day or once a week.
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- Traffic Spikes:
This alert detects and lets you know about spikes in your traffic. If generating a buzz about your product or company is a business objective of yours, then you should certainly know about a huge spike in your traffic, and take appropriate action accordingly.
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- Drop in Goal Completion:
An alert of traffic drop would not identify a drop in the goal conversion, if traffic deficiency is not the issue. The Drop in Goal Completion alert is an effective way to detect broken shopping carts, submission forms and other such issues. The frequency of running the alert and the percentages should be adjusted according to your website.
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- Analytics has Flatlined
This alert is run daily by most websites, and its principle of working is same as that of traffic drop alert, but this alert takes percentage to extreme. If you find it to be triggered, it’s perhaps because your analytics code has been broken by something. It’s quite useful when your site is managed by many people, who are not informed about changes being made to the site by someone.
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- Spike in Goal Completion:
If there’s a spike in your goal completion, you should be aware of it. Although it’s not something calamitous like drop in goal completion, but you should know how the spike occurred. Using this alert, you can investigate whatever caused the spike, so that everyone can remember it and can make a note of it.
- Drop in Google Referrals:
If your website drops out of Google’s top pages suddenly, the Google referrals of your site would also drop. This factor forms the basis of this alert. This alert begins working with a large segment that comprises only Google referrals. Then, it searches for a drop of 50% in visits from the segment. So, if your site faces a trouble due to an algo update, or is penalized, you will know about it through Google Intelligence.
When you integrate business intelligence or Google Intelligence into your online marketing efforts, you will certainly get great results. So, give a boost to your online marketing this year by incorporating business intelligence in it. You will certainly see success.
Authors Bio
Thomas Miller is an Online Marketing Consultant in B3net Bio – A leading Life Science Digital Marketing Company in Orange County, United States. He loves to explore the new opportunities in business and share news and updates through social media. He also loves to interact with others through his write ups.
