Business intelligence (BI) in digital marketing

Mike Walkden

Head of Business Intelligence


Analytics and Data Science

Business intelligence (BI) is the collection, engineering and visualization of data. In digital marketing, BI can be used to create data-driven digital marketing strategies that drive conversions and increase ROI.

Business intelligence is an end-to-end data solution which takes raw data and turns it into powerful, actionable insights. The process encompasses:

This data is then fed back into the digital strategy.

Data collection

 

Collecting the right data, in the right format, is the first step in delivering a data-driven marketing strategy. Not all data is relevant to your goals, and the data you need may not be automatically tracked.

At this stage of the BI journey, your digital strategist(s) should sit down and work out which metrics correlate with your business goals. From there, they can analyze your analytics requirements and implement the right tracking through a tag management system like Google Tag Manager.

Other areas to look at include integrating your analytics with third-party platforms and CRM systems, setting up goal funnels, and customizing your analytics e.g. to track orders.

Data engineering

 

Your data contains powerful insights, but these insights are not always immediately accessible. We first need to clean the data and then re-aggregate it to make it fit for purpose and to ensure it performs well within the reports.

During this stage, we use best in class toolsets, such as Funnel, Talend Stitch, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataprep, to make the best of your data.

Hosting data in a secure Google data warehouse allows us to further embellish your data with custom assets like trading calendars, year on year lookups, budget and cost tracking data and any other relevant input that ensures we are delivering insights against KPIs.

Data visualization

 

Being able to present data in the right format, for the right person, is the key to ensuring all stakeholders understand performance, in order to achieve stakeholder buy in. Data visualization helps you to show, X caused Y which means Z, insights which can help everyone to make informed business and marketing decisions.

Data visualization involves the use of several tools and platforms to surface your data. We use best in-class BI tools in order to deliver your data in the most appropriate way. While the end result is clear and easy to understand, the process of connecting and prepping different data sources can be very complicated.

This element of business intelligence requires our teams to connect and blend different data sources, cleanse data, and apply filters and rules in order to build integrated, automated reports and bespoke, intuitive dashboards.

Digital strategy

 

The end goal of business intelligence in digital marketing is creating a robust, data-driven marketing strategy which reaches, converts, and retains your target audience.

The insights gained from the BI process allows you to fully understand the customer journey, which channels convert and where, which keywords are most valuable, and more.

Once you have these insights, you can identify where to move budgets and increase activity, how to push users along the funnel, and how to optimize your campaigns to deliver a higher ROI.

Need help getting your data in order?

 

This webinar is part of our wider B2B Playbook that is designed to help B2B businesses with all aspects of their digital marketing from leveraging data, acquiring more traffic, creating assets that resonate and succeeding internationally.

In the data section we’ve compiled useful insights on everything you’ll need to know, from capturing data to building advanced machine learning solutions using your first-party data.

Want to utilize your data more effectively?Contact our experts to learn how


"