The future of Internet marketing is at stake. Especially in an uncertain economy, it ultimately rests in our hands to deliver meaningful results that improve business. But what results are we seeking? And how do we know if and when we’ve achieved them? Those are the questions that can only be answered by creative, critical thinking – an activity that is exponentially aided by introducing business intelligence (BI) to our online marketing efforts.
For a simple demonstration of a company that uses BI well, let’s look at Amazon.
The company’s book recommendations, for instance, are directly a result of their putting both granular and aggregate business intelligence to good use. In short, they are able to make their website and customer communications more directly relevant and more effective, on average, because they experiment, track, and analyze their ideas quickly.
It’s important to note that they don’t keep this information under lock and key. They share it with their customers – either on a personal level (your purchase history indicates you might like…) or in the aggregate (others who bought x also bought…), because their audience is most likely best suited to know what to do with that information.
The good news is that the market isn’t demanding that you build an Amazon-scale business intelligence system overnight. It’s okay – and often desirable – to start by identifying a small problem that could be helped if only you had access to the right information at the right time.
This problem could be as simple as:
- Which ad is more effective at driving traffic to our site?
- Are we spending the right amount in the right way in the right places?
- Are people doing what we need them to do once they get there?
- How do changes in our offer and layout affect our critical metrics?
With properly implemented business intelligence systems, you can:
- Improve click-through rates of advertising or emails
- Increase your advertising ROI
- Test landing pages and workflows to improve conversions
- Make more relevant content or product recommendations
However small we start, though, we must always keep the bigger picture in mind, because, among other reasons, the decisions we make at these early stages may have an impact on how easy it is to maintain data integrity later.
To businesspeople without database training, some of these solutions that require conversations about normalized data, ETLs, OLAPs, data warehouse tables and the like might be foreign concepts.
Likewise, to database architects without business training or frequent access to the day-to-day decisions that are critical to fulfilling the mission of the organization, some of the problems may escape their notice.
That’s why it’s so important that they work together, form partnerships and steering committees to stimulate creative solutions to the critical problems that threaten business growth.
A good book on the subject for people who fall into the first category is Cindi Howson’s Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App. It isn’t going to teach anyone how to be a database architect. Rather, it equips readers with the ability to ask the right questions when they have a problem that could be helped if they only had access to the right information at the right time.
In short, it’s a wonderful primer for teaching what goes into preparing, organizing, selling, and facilitating data-fed intelligence centers. However, the implications of the topic may convince you that with creative thinking, business intelligence can be a big part of fulfilling the marketer’s dream of meeting the Web’s ultimate potential.
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