Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Intelligence

New business models that disrupt sectors, companies that generate internal startups and spin offs to attack market niches, technologies that detect patterns hidden from the human eye… In the face of this maelstrom of changes, evolutions and data, the concept called Marketing Intelligence appears to the rescue. .

Marketing Intelligence is more linked to a cultural change in the organization or a change in philosophy than to a specific process or technology. One of the key pillars for its implementation is to successfully extract, process and analyze data from the environment, market, sector, customers and competition. In this way, more precise and effective strategic and tactical decisions can be made.

Although Marketing Intelligence could, at first glance, seem like a Big Data project, there are substantial differences between them:

• The main objective of Marketing Intelligence is  to collect enough data to understand the business and commercial environment in which companies compete and obtain information on the target audience, competition, prices, risks… contrasting with the multitude of objectives in which they can be focus on Big Data projects.
• The volume of data handled in Marketing Intelligence is much less than in Big Data projects. The analysis is more focused on building a map of data and contextualized variables in the company’s scope of action in order to make decisions with greater certainty .
• Marketing Intelligence always has the customer at the center:  it is a duty to know him, detect his needs and know how to cover them from the position of the company. The exhaustive knowledge of the target audience and the different Customer Journeys will allow carrying out various analyzes based on collected and interpreted data, always obtaining valuable information.

Another well-known concept with which certain points are shared is Business Intelligence. Unlike this, Marketing Intelligence focuses on extracting and obtaining data that directly affects the Marketing department, instead of affecting other strategic or functional departments of the company. In the technological part, there are some tools that could be common and that will be discussed later.

How To Carry Out A Marketing Intelligence Strategy?

First of all, it is vital to have a  global vision  of all the processes and data generated by the company. This strategy requires profiles that plan and profiles with analytical capacity. Some of the benefits that we can obtain after its implementation are:

• Raise the quantity and quality of quantifiable data.
• To be able to carry out more effective strategies.
• Reduce and avoid risks and costs in the Marketing area.
• Increase the acquisition of qualified clients.
• Detect consumer trends in the sector.
• Optimize the Customer Journey of customers.

A fundamental aspect before starting is to ask yourself the specific business questions so as not to get out of the designed roadmap:

• What objectives do you want to achieve?
• What information does my company need in order to make more accurate decisions and achieve the goals described above?
• What types of data are necessary to obtain this information?
• Have we identified the data sources?
• Who or who will extract the data and information?
• Who is going to govern the information and with what tools/technology?
• What will be the frequency of status reports and drawing of conclusions and next steps?
• Who or who will carry out the decisions once the status is done ?

Define Your KPIs And Schedule To Follow

The sheer amount of data that a company can obtain will generate numerous metrics. Conforming the map of the key KPIs to monitor and follow will be a really important milestone. Choosing the KPIs correctly will greatly facilitate the work of interpretation.

It will also be necessary to design a schedule and schedule status reports, status meetings, decision making, ideas for continuous improvement.

Once we have this part clear, we will proceed to choose the tool that best fits the Marketing Intelligence strategy .

Select Suitable Tools And Dashboards

One of the keys is to detect patterns and be able to establish relationships in the data that has been extracted. This is where Business Intelligence tools can come into play, in a Marketing Intelligence strategy , for example  Qlik, Tableau or  Power BI , and the use of a CRM to segment and further automate and enrich the strategy.

Expert Decision Making And Analysis

After having solved the right business questions, defined key KPIs and selected the right tool, the data extraction, treatment and visualization will begin.

For the analysis and decision making, internal professionals or externally contracted experts will be needed to make the most of the data and take out all the potential that it transmits. His job will be to provide a clear vision of the situation of your company to guide the next decisions you must make.

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