How Business Analytics Can Be Used in Marketing

Marketing is a critical business operation. Companies all around the U.S. pour billions of dollars into developing and promoting their products. The hard part is that their best efforts often yield no measurable results. It’s a bit like spending all day on the lake with a fishing pole in your hand and coming home with nothing gained but the experience.

The best marketing teams in the country use business analytics to bring their marketing initiatives to life. Continue reading to discover how business analytics can transform your company’s marketing.

What is business analytics?

Before you can begin to understand how business analytics can improve your marketing and business decisions, you must know what it is. Business analytics is a discipline within data science that encompasses the tech tools and best practices used to derive actionable insights from statistical analysis. Data scientists create statistical models using complex statistical methods to apply different analytics processes, converting raw data into various types of business intelligence.

There are many different analytic processes data scientists run, including prescriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, and predictive analytics. In the following sections, we’ll answer the question that finds you reading this article: What are business analytics tools and statistical methods used in marketing?

You can use diagnostic analytics to find your target audience.

In marketing, it’s critical to know who your target market is and how best to connect with them. Indeed, one of the most common business problems — especially for small businesses — is identifying the ideal customer. However, with the right information technology tools and techniques, data scientists help large and small businesses pinpoint their ideal consumers.

Data scientists often use diagnostic analytics to answer a specific question. A great example of how a marketing team would use this analytic process would be to start by asking who their ideal customer is and then begin outlining factors that meet their criteria. Marketing companies like SWBP use diagnostic analytics to compete in their local market against national brands.

Business analytics can help your company enhance the customer experience.

There’s no more useful information in the business world than what’s on the customer’s mind. Indeed, one of the most common uses of business analytics is using historical data to get insights into customer preferences and behavior.

The more companies know about how their customers think, the more able they are to tailor their customer experience. Indeed, companies have gotten so good at mapping the customer journey these days that all customers expect a customized experience. Descriptive analytics give companies an idea of who the customer is, and prescriptive analytics shows them how to provide the customer with the ideal experience.

Predictive analytics enables companies to predict demand changes.

As you can see, big data is hard at work solving real-world business problems. The most promising business discipline in big data analytics is predictive analytics. As the name suggests, it’s an analytic process that data scientists and business users utilize to make predictions about future events and tailor their marketing strategy and supply chain accordingly. It’s much easier to weather storms and capitalize on trends when you see them before everyone else.

It takes an effective marketing strategy for small businesses to flourish and gain a competitive edge. Companies invest a lot of capital in marketing, and it can be crushing to their bottom line when their best efforts fail to yield positive results. Marketing teams rely on business intelligence to increase the efficacy and ROI of their marketing efforts.

Companies can use data analytics to identify and target their ideal consumers. Furthermore, business analytics enables them to get insights into customer behavior. Business users can also use prescriptive analytics to find ways to enhance the customer experience. It seems that the better question would be, “How can’t business analytics be used in marketing?”