Companies and brands store a lot of data in their databases today, and the size of data stored keeps increasing exponentially with time. You need business intelligence services to help you transform this data into actionable intelligence.
A proper understanding of this data is key to making sure your organization can meet the tactical and strategic business decisions, and needs.
With the right business intelligence tools, you can analyze the data sets available, and present your analytical findings in a manner that’s easy to understand, through graphs, charts, dashboards, summaries, or reports. The following are some of the benefits you stand to gain by investing in efficient business intelligence tools:
- Understand customers better
- Sales and marketing targets
- Decision making
- Understand your projections
- Improved data collection methods
- Improve your returns
- Compliance and data accuracy
- Improved productivity
- Enhanced customer experience
- Data visualization
It is also important not to confuse business intelligence with business analytics. Business intelligence gives you a description of a given state of your data, past or present.
It does not tell you how to respond or react to this data. Business analytics, on the other hand, involves analyzing data sets to predict the future or a possible reaction to an approach.
Here is an in-depth look at the benefits your brand stands to gain from business intelligence:
1. Understand Customers Better
One of the biggest challenges that most brands have is that they do not have a good understanding of what their customers need. Some have an idea, but most of them never go beyond the basics.
This is why there is a dire need for you to invest in the right business intelligence practices. With business intelligence, you can use the data at your disposal to understand the nature of the interaction you have with your clients.
“It is increasingly difficult to sell to people unless they are genuinely interested or attracted to your brand or product. Through business intelligence, you have all the tools you need to make a direct appeal to your customers.”
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This is not just about reaching out to your customers but encouraging the customers to reach out to you. This makes all the difference and might be the one thing that keeps you from lagging behind your competitors.
One thing you have to understand about business today, especially on the internet is that people have become more proactive. It is increasingly difficult to sell to people unless they are genuinely interested or attracted to your brand or product. Through business intelligence, you have all the tools you need to make a direct appeal to your customers.
2. Sales and Marketing Targets
Through business intelligence, you get an in-depth analysis of your performance, which will help you improve the performance of your marketing and sales departments. These two departments working together efficiently will be good for your brand in the long run.
Business intelligence involves among other things, data science, predictive analytics, and CRO, factors that are important in giving the sales team the necessary tools for measuring their performance, activity, and determining trends in customer behavior.
This will also help you understand whether the approaches you are using are relevant to your customer needs and expectations.
Business intelligence also helps you improve visibility, which is ideal for your sales team. You have access to information that will help you fine-tune your performance to meet the different marketing campaign targets you have set out for different teams.
3. Decision Making
Data analytics play an important role in day-to-day decision-making in the organization. Access to information is one thing, but knowing what to do with that information is better.
The ultimate aim of business intelligence is to make sure that information at your disposal is structured accordingly, and help you inform decision making in all aspects of your company.
What you are looking at with business intelligence, is not just having easy access to data, but relevant, up-to-date data that will help you make better-informed business decisions about things like CRO, and help you improve the overall performance of your company.
To meet these demands, you would need a reliable conversion rate optimization solution. This creates a link between different teams, and in the process, delivers important business metrics for your management team to analyze and act accordingly, such as sales cycles, product preferences, productivity, and market trends.
4. Understand your Projections
The only way you can make progress in your business is to have a better understanding of the past and present data, and use this to make an accurate projection of your future.
Business intelligence gives you the tools necessary to have a better understanding of your current position as a business, draw lessons from your past, and use this to map the way forward for the future.
“Your business is only as good as the data supporting it. Business intelligence helps you improve your data collection efficiency.”
Through descriptive analytics, you can use data mining to understand your business history, based on changes and policies that you have implemented along the way.
In predictive analytics, however, you introduce forecasting techniques to help you get a better understanding of the statistics you have, and gain a better insight into the future of your business. This can be done through a number of simulation techniques.
5. Improved Data Collection Methods
Your business is only as good as the data supporting it. Business intelligence helps you improve your data collection efficiency.
The conventional methods of data collection are notorious for time-wasting. There are so many sources from where you can pull data.
By the time you identify the relevant information, process it, and present the data in form of accurate analysis, you will have lost too much time since this is primarily a manual process.
You end up spending so much time and resources on time management, which is not supposed to be the case. With a good business intelligence system, you can automate the entire process, and save time by focusing your attention on the results instead of the data.
6. Improve your Returns
One thing that every brand manager desires is to see the ROI improving all through the company. All the way from customer experience to sales and conversion, you need to see an improvement in efficiency.
With the right web analytics team, it is easier to achieve this. However, without the insight and discipline required, this might just be a pipe dream.
One of the biggest challenges that companies have is working with conceptions and hypotheses especially when dealing with customer preferences and behavior.
This is equivalent to flying blind. You basically make guesses on what should be done, or work with theoretical concepts on what you think is the right way to go – and you will fail.
In business intelligence, there are tools at your disposal that will help you make informed decisions regarding the business. You can track, inform, measure, and manage customer experiences, and this helps you make sure all members of the team are aware of their responsibility.
Through business intelligence, you can know how well your brand is doing, especially whether you are meeting goals or not.
7. Compliance and Data Accuracy
Data regulations are getting stronger by the day. As a business, you need to make sure you are always in compliance with the changes in data management and regulations in the markets where you are operating.
To gain a 360-degree understanding of your customers, you need proper data management protocols in place.
Data consistency and accuracy are important in realizing this dream. The reason for this is because the nature of the data you have affects all parts of the business. Any flaw in understanding this data could have dire ramifications down the line.
In any business intelligence project, you are working on, you must use the best data governance procedure for efficient performance. Central data management will help you weed out the inaccuracies in your business and improve transparency.
This should also help you find out and stop unnecessary spending on unworthy marketing avenues.
8. Improved Productivity
One of the benefits of business intelligence is that it helps you highlight and improve the bottlenecks that you might have in your operation. This is also a good way to help you refine business processes, automate some of the repetitive tasks and improve your organization.
You have the tools necessary to set your priorities straight, improve your work ethic, and generally take your business to a new level of productivity.
The gains from improved productivity and efficiency will be highlighted in a highly responsive customer service sector, efficient time management by your sales team, and good returns from your marketing campaigns. Through automated dashboards and reporting, this improved efficiency is also evident at the senior level.
9.Enhanced Customer Experience
Marketing has advanced over the years, and it is no secret that this is the one place where companies are battling to win over customer support and loyalty. From experience, more than 66% of marketers agree that customers are won or lost on customer experience.
It is, therefore, important that you look into ways of improving your knowledge of the customers in order to provide a superior customer experience for them.
In web analytics, you have tools that will be useful in understanding what customers want, re-engineering your customer experience, and in the long run, improve your customer retention ratings.
The tools available at your disposal will provide you access to lots of useful information, all in one place, making your work easier and more efficient. While getting access to these insights is important, it is more important for you to save time while at it too.
10. Data Visualization
Having the right business intelligence system smoothens the process of creating graphs, matrices, and charts which are useful in communicating information that would otherwise be complicated.
Presenting information in visual format has a 97% appreciation value compared to 68% if the data was presented in written format. This is because visual aids make it easier to digest information that would have otherwise been considered complex.