Delivering the brand: building market intelligence in the cloud

Marketing has been increasingly moving online over a decade now, and with that migration comes a number of tools like email marketing, e-commerce websites, mobile and social media networks that allow marketers to communicate their brand message and deliver marketing propositions directly to their target customers.

With this change has come an even louder call for marketers to be held more and more to account, and so they can no longer complete a campaign and sit back to wait for the phones to ring. Marketing has traditionally been seen by other parts of an organisation as a cost centre rather than a department that assists sales with its efforts of creating new customer accounts and thereby increasing the revenue of the entire company.

Sales, marketing and business intelligence analytical tools have therefore presented them with an invaluable opportunity to show where their marketing strategies are working, and how they will impact on the entire organisation. They help to put marketers back where they should be: firmly and clearly in the driving seat, and giving the firm a strategic direction in which to head, and they can employ the tools to ensure that the right financial and non-financial resources are in place at the most optimal moment.

Richard Kellett, director of marketing at SAS UK, says that in the past business and marketing analytical tools have been used to form two main usage models: the first involves how to differentiate services and offerings by targeting the right people in a timely manner to support product development, market demand, pricing, customer segmentation, behavioural analysis and so on; and the second is about how to operate the business more effectively. The latter concerns an analysis that considers which products cost the company more to sell or service than is gained in revenue, and how they can be re-marketed.

With the second model in mind, marketers would be looking to develop strategies and associated metrics like market penetration, lost leader effectiveness, and they will need to define what constitutes 'marketing effectiveness’ to determine how they measure and report on it. The analysis and reporting process is critical to the organisation’s success.

That’s because marketing and business intelligence tools enable you to keep an eye on whether an organisation’s overall business and marketing strategies are working as planned. But if they aren’t, they allow marketers and others to adjust to any internal and external environmental changes in their target markets.

The most used tools
A number of these tools are also available in the cloud. Christophe Primault, Founder of GetApp, says “the most used cloud-based tools, those that are utilised by marketers, are currently for email marketing (like those by Aweber and MailChimp), social media marketing (eg Hootsuite), online surveying and reporting (like those provided by Confirmit and SurveyGizmo) and marketing automation (Marketo, Aprimo and Eloqua).”

He adds that marketers are also using web-based marketing platforms “to monitor all of their online marketing activities” by using solutions such as HubSpot and SimplyCast. When it comes to business intelligence tools marketers apparently often go for solutions like Qlickview and Plateau which enable them to visualise their data.

You also have the larger enterprise scale SAS and SAP Business Objects business intelligence tools, which can integrate with both cloud and non-cloud marketing tools and platforms. However, they still bring forth a key challenge, which is about how an organisation gains increasing value out of the data it collates from a widening range of sales and marketing channels. With that comes a need to manage larger data volumes and sets.