The term “marketing intelligence” could potentially mean different things to different people or organizations. Our interpretation of marketing intelligence, though, is about using and interpreting rich data from the present day to signpost and make decisions about future marketing endeavors. Yes, there’s an element of tracking your existing marketing data to gauge your previous and current performance.
But marketing intelligence is about the entire timeline with the future as a kind of ongoing grand finale: the insight you’ve gathered from marketing data to plan your marketing campaigns and activities, the planting of flags within the marketing touchpoints to be sure you collect all the flagged data and interpreting that data to make predictions. It works cyclically: marketing intelligence tells us what happened, but also gives us insight into future performance, and this cycle repeats as a virtuous circle… if you’ve laid the groundwork and understood what you need to do to make marketing intelligence work for you.
What is marketing intelligence?
A basic definition of marketing intelligence is relevant data that is collected and used to understand and plan the marketing efforts of an organization. You collect data from multiple sources, which could be online, offline, in-store, surveys, call center interactions, social media, CRM systems, and so on. And you analyze this data to get metrics about what happened during the campaign. What worked? What converted? At what point, and in what channels did potential customers convert? Maybe you will be using a marketing attribution model to reach these conclusions… but that’s all backward, past-facing marketing intelligence, which is only one aspect of what marketing intelligence should mean to you. The rear-view-mirror model fails to capture the nuance of the marketing intelligence timeline.
Analyzing the past to predict the future
Another, arguably more important, part of marketing intelligence is data analysis to guide future decision-making and marketing strategy. Paradoxically, you have to do some planning and preliminary work to “mine” the customer pathway for future insight. That is, let’s say you’re setting up your campaign. You need to plant some trip wires at all the touchpoints to capture data about customer interactions as and when they “trip” (or act/convert). As you can imagine, this provides a robust and detailed view of what actually happened, but is also an active strategy for moving forward. That is, did your prospects trip over your wires: where, when, how? Taking the analysis further, have you understood customer intent and placed marketing content and spend where it made the most difference? If you gained insight and can activate the data in your upcoming campaigns, you have guideposts for what is coming.
Beyond challenges for big and small data in digging for real-world insights
There’s both truth and hype in the last decade’s ad nauseam discussion of big data. There’s no doubt whatsoever that if you wrangle control of your data, have high quality data and have asked the right questions of it, the power of artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics tooling and you (or your analytics specialists) is virtually unlimited. It may be better said that “big data” as touted by the consulting and tech industries has been overhyped because many enterprises just don’t have the means or expertise to take their massive data collection over the finish line. They collect for the sake of collecting, often don’t perform any kind of analysis, and when they do, it’s often siloed from other parts of the organization. So big data, despite being a cornerstone of marketing intelligence, can have its pitfalls without proper planning and management.
Another challenge is the tendency not to think widely enough about data sources. Most marketing and sales organizations have more than just social and website data. There are CRMs, ad data, call center/in-store data, and other “small data” pieces that aren’t systematic or necessarily scalable like big data, but provide valuable insight anyway. An example of this could be word-of-mouth testimonials or day-to-day customer feedback collected in survey or poll forms. This is quintessential “small data” that can take a snapshot of customer sentiment patterns and let you get your finger on the pulse in real-time interactively.
Don’t look back now! Drive marketing intelligence forward
Are you ready to play the game and stake your wager on future-facing marketing intelligence and strategies? We’re here to advise you and help you get a handle on the entire marketing intelligence timeline to make wise marketing decisions for long-term business success.
Up your stakes in the marketing intelligence game and test your data-driven marketing effectiveness.
