Marketing Data Intelligence Software 2024: Ultimate Guide

Marketing Data Intelligence is the practice of collecting, analyzing the data related to marketing activities either from internal and external sources. This analysis helps marketers to accurately and efficiently analyze the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, determine ROI and work on improvements.

Marketing Data Intelligence can be used to guide different marketing goals, such as decisions in relation to competitors, products and consumer trends or behaviors.

What is Marketing Data Intelligence Software?

Marketing Data Intelligence software determines what data intelligence is needed, collects it by searching the environment and delivering it to the marketers. The function of Marketing Data Intelligence software is to provide insights into marketing activities by using customers, competition, and growth potential.

As the Marketing Data Intelligence software brings together data from various external and internal resources, it can be categorized as

Competitive Intelligence

This refers to marketing data intelligence derived from the collection and analysis of information related to customers, potential customers, competitors and external factors impacting business like regulatory and compliance trends.

Account Data Intelligence

Buyer Intent Data Intelligence

Buyer Intent Data Intelligence gives information on what a prospective customer is interested in purchasing and why. This in addition to data that provides detailed information on the buyer’s journeys can help marketing teams identify new opportunities.

Marketing Data Intelligence vs Business Intelligence

Unified View of Customers

Customers engage with business across a variety of channels - website, email, call, social media, physical channels, partners, etc. There is a proliferation of customer data from all these different sources. Marketing Data Intelligence software helps to consolidate, integrate and analyze and provide insights derived from all this data.

Drive Effective Marketing Campaigns

Data, when unified, cleaned and combined with intelligent analysis, offers actionable intelligence for marketing capabilities. Manually analysis can only yield sporadic insights and relies heavily on the skill of the analyzer. Marketing Data Intelligence software can help marketers regularly uncover activities that will unlock the highest potential ROI. Higher-level insights can also be inferred through simulations and testing, which a Marketing Data Intelligence software delivers.

Personalize Customer Engagement

Marketing Data Intelligence provides deep insight into marketers about customers buying patterns, preferences. It helps organizations to understand how customers in different segments behave, their preferences and the likelihood of responding to marketing offers and discounts. This helps marketers to tailor their content to meet specific customer needs at the right using their preferred channel.

Track Industry Trends

Competitive Intelligence Software provides insight to the organization where their competitors are heading and also external market knowledge around customer expectations, trends, technologies, market disruptors. If marketers are equipped with this foresight, it gives a tremendous competitive advantage.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Usage of Marketing Data Intelligence software brings in a culture of data-driven decision making. It brings clarity to organizations around their strengths, competitive advantage, and potential capability gaps. It helps them to focus and prioritize their investment and effort in the right direction which helps in getting better ROI.

Intelligent Automation

Marketing Data Intelligence software can help teams automate actions within set parameters such as bids and buys for ad campaigns at scale, allocation decisions, and retargeting. This, in turn, frees up tremendous time for marketing teams to focus on critical activities.

Better Allocation of Time and Resources

Marketing teams can easily spend up to 30 hours every week in reporting and aggregating campaign analytics data from multiple media sources for side by side analysis. A Marketing Data Intelligence software can reduce this time and effort, and provide results with far greater accuracy.

Improved Spending Efficiencies

Having real-time data enables marketing teams to take advantage of more opportunities for optimization. Knowing which customers respond to which messages, and being able to quickly respond to customers can help brands maximize profitability. This enables early bidding adjustment or elimination of underperforming channels before they run too long, wasting budgets.

Which industries use Marketing Data Intelligence Software?

A wide range of enterprises today need to analyze millions of interactions and data points on a daily basis in order to provide effective marketing tactics. Industries with a huge volume of customer touchpoints such as retailers and e-commerce companies, plus marketing teams from industries such as technology, computer software, retail, e-commerce, healthcare, finance and banking, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, can all benefit from Marketing Data Intelligence software.

Data Governance

Data governance is the process of maintaining data unification, normalization, and combining and is essential while bringing together various data sources. This is a challenge that many businesses face and the right Marketing Data Intelligence software helps ensure marketing starts with clean marketing data.

Data Driven Insights

One of the top reasons for the failure of marketing activities is due to the improper analysis of marketing data. Marketing Data Intelligence software overcomes misinterpretation of data and “gut opinions” by offering scientifically-driven insights into decision-making. Measuring and monitoring key marketing campaigns is necessary to eliminate guesswork - this is where Marketing Data Intelligence software helps.

Effective Attribution

With consolidated and integrated data, Marketing Data Intelligence software can enable accurate marketing attribution, including simple metrics like opens, clicks, conversions, and sales, or answers to event queries such as what caused this existing customer to purchase a particular item at a particular time.

Driving Growth

Marketing Data Intelligence software that provides competitive intelligence helps in predicting future trends over time, understanding the big picture view of market and competitors’ performance. Also, it provides insight into the company’s own marketing performance. All these help businesses to forecast future results and take necessary action to drive growth.

Manage Complexities

One of the biggest challenges identified by marketing teams was access to too much disconnected data. A Singular study mentions that nearly 76% of CMOs report that the complexity of measuring marketing performance severely impairs their ability to make informed decisions. Marketing Data Intelligence software enables the collective convergence of information in order to develop effective marketing tactics.

Automated Data Collection

Marketing Data Intelligence software offers automation capabilities to simplify the process of data collection, preparation, and management.

Data Unification

Marketing Data Intelligence software enables data connectivity from multiple systems to any destination to create a single source of truth.

Data Visualization

Users can understand their data better using various data visualization tools built into the Marketing Data Intelligence software.

Analytical Control

With Marketing Data Intelligence software marketers can slice and dice their data, allowing brands to view, analyze and understand their information in new and insightful ways. This reduces dependency on IT teams for data results.

Data Intelligence

Marketing Data Intelligence software offers users the ability to perform advanced analytical tasks like market sizing, trend analysis, SWOT analysis, scenario planning, wargaming, buying patterns analysis, and value drivers’ analysis.

Alerts and Notifications

Marketing Data Intelligence software offers business users the ability to set alerts in order to monitor changes and gain real-time market insights.

Predictive Capabilities

Because of the huge volumes of data involved, Marketing Data Intelligence software relies on machine learning and AI to analyze and offer predictive solutions to marketing problems.

Data Security

Most Marketing Data Intelligence software comes with extensive security controls, in order to safeguard sensitive data. Users are given role-based access based on their marketing intelligence requirements.

Marketing Data Intelligence and AI

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still slowly making its entry into various industries, its contribution to marketing technologies is immense. Machine Learning is helping marketers crunch huge volumes of data and provide insights, which would otherwise not be detected.

Natural Language Processing

AI-driven analytics is offering business users the ability to query their data in the form of natural voice-based questions. Marketing teams can now use Natural Language interfaces such as the Amazon Echo to integrate with their Marketing Data Intelligence software and be able to ask questions regarding performance and listen to the results.

Predictive Analytics

AI can analyze huge chunks of historic data in combination with other inputs to detect patterns in data and predict future activities. When used in tandem with Marketing Intelligence software, AI can use customer behavior data points to predict critical activities like purchasing drivers and churn. This capability can help guide the actions of marketing teams in better ways than ever before.

Here are a few factors to consider when choosing a Marketing Data Intelligence Software.

Single Stack vs Full Stack Solutions

Marketing Data Intelligence Software can come as a consolidated platform where it provides complete support to collect, consolidate, integrate and analyze data. Such software comes with a set of data connectors for all popular sources. On the other hand, there can be specialized software which focus on core functionality around analytics but support to bring in best-in-class tools for data collection, processing, storage. Such solutions come with strong integration capabilities. Such full-stack solutions bring in additional complexities around multi-vendor interactions.

Depending on your need and the complexity of your environment you can decide to go for single stack or full-stack solutions. Such decisions could also be driven by an organization’s existing tool usage.

Technology Considerations and Complexity

Marketing Data Intelligence software can come with a very sophisticated set of features like dashboards, state-of-the-art visualization, reporting capabilities. Also, many software are backed by AI for analytics. Based on your martech roadmap, you can make the choice based on the vendor’s technology roadmap. Also, some very sophisticated solutions may require dedicated data scientists and analysts which in turn adds to the overall cost of the solution. If you have a lean organization, the choice should be made based on the ease of use for marketers.

Channel Support

Ensure the software takes into account the needs of all stakeholders and can support all channels that are currently being used, and those that may be used in the future.

Data Connectors

Marketing Data Intelligence software is data-intensive, it should be able to pull data from multiple sources both internal and external to the organization. It would be good to have out of the box data connectors for all the popular data sources. You can assess the complexity of your environment and the data connector support available to see the match. If there is a need to do custom development for connectors, it would involve additional effort, cost and time along with ongoing maintenance issues.

Time to Value(TTV)

Setting up time and effort for Marketing Data Intelligence software varies considerably depending on the complexity of the software as well as the organization’s environment. Technology complexity, integration capabilities and availability of out of box data connectors influence TTV. Choices can be made based on the proven abilities of the solution.

Training and Support

Time and effort to ramp up the new teams to use the software can be a major consideration. Here the quality of training and support provided by the vendor can be an important factor.

Challenges in Adoption of Marketing Data Intelligence Solution

Overcoming Data Silos

Unifying data that has been mapped from diverse sources is a complex and time-consuming task. Since this is not a uniform task across verticals, Marketing Data Intelligence software can pose a challenge for adoption as the starting point is data availability.

Lack of Extensibility

With time, marketing problems and the technology deployed to solve them will change. Also, the software should be able to meet the scale and performance requirements of the future. A Marketing Data Intelligence software can potentially lock a business into a technology environment that’s hard to exit without affecting the bottom line.

Lack of Customization

The needs of the organization can widely vary and specifically around dashboards, reports and analytical capabilities. Customization capability and ease of doing the same would be key considerations. The software which fails to meet this key requirement poses a challenge for organizations.

Complexity

Technology capabilities alone will not benefit the organization but the right set of people are needed who can use it effectively to generate the right set of reports and actionable insights. It might require different roles to support this - data scientist, analyst, data engineer along with the marketer who can effectively drive the requirement. The skill and effectiveness of these roles play an important role and lack of this can pose a challenge for adoption.

ROI for Marketing Data Intelligence Software

Investing in a good Marketing data Intelligence Software can be a very profitable venture. The benefits in time saved, efficiency and growth will soon be evident on the bottom line of the company.

Campaign Performance Analysis

Marketing Data Intelligence software can give decision-makers a comprehensive view of the RoI on their marketing efforts at a very granular level. This implies knowing the overall costs of all marketing efforts (paid or organic) and being able to stack it up against the results achieved. This gives marketers detailed insights into campaign performance which helps in spotting market trends and making wise business decisions.

Faster Response

Speed is a key attribute of modern marketing. And with access to digitally connected consumers around the world, the opportunities for exponential growth are very real. The ability to quickly respond with targeted marketing campaigns based on data-driven intelligence plays a critical role in achieving growth spikes.

Increased RoI with more channels

You could be limiting the growth of your business by utilizing only a few advertising channels. While these channels may be significant to your success, it’s important that additional growth opportunities are explored. Marketing Data Intelligence software can help you uncover potential channels and test to understand RoI before extending your budgets.

Improve Conversion Rates

Granular insights that a Marketing Data Intelligence software can deliver are critical in getting potential customers to engage, convert and purchase. This makes the in-depth and detailed analysis indispensable, as it tells marketers exactly where, how and why conversions are taking place, enabling ways for improvement.

Optimizing Assets and Communication

Which ad copy is delivering the best CTR? Which communication strategy is working better? Which landing page is getting the highest number of hits? Which assets are being downloaded the most? Marketing Data Intelligence software allows you to test multiple options, and delivers reports on the performance of each asset, furthering your ability for optimization of communication strategy.