How To Understand Consumer Behavior Using Business Intelligence

The traditional components of marketing have expanded exponentially, which has led to retailers seeking better tools to help them understand consumer behavior.  In addition to email, customer relationship management (CRM), print advertising, and direct mail, social media, mobile marketing, and e-commerce are also factors that have to be weighed. Let's take a look at how to understand consumer behavior using business intelligence.

Today, consumers interact with brands and make purchasing decisions on a wide variety of platforms.  This has increased the amount of consumer behavior data available for retailers to maintain.  Consequently, the marketing campaign management process is now much more complex.  Budgeting, planning, predicting consumer behavior and providing superior customer service all play a huge role in keeping retail consumers happy. 

Making it Manageable

By providing retailers easy, straightforward access to data for reporting, analysis, planning, and decision support, business intelligence analytics make the complicated process much more manageable.  Data is transformed into actionable information that helps retailers make quicker decisions based on facts – before, during, and after marketing campaigns. 

Most retailers know who their target customers are by means of tools already on hand, such as a CRM system and/or an e-commerce database.  However, the proliferation of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, has tremendously amplified identifying and understanding target markets.

By combining social media data, fans, followers, comments, and “likes,” with the existing consumer demographic information from the CRM, business intelligence provides a much more complete picture of your consumers.  Overlaying the combination of data on a geographical map creates segmentation illustrations to help your marketing team target a specific audience effectively as well as propel improved results for future marketing campaigns. 

Creating a Competitive Advantage

Consumer behavior insight is invaluable in today’s highly competitive, technological world.  After combining the social media data and CRM, take things a step further and connect your social data to financial systems, catalogs, inventory, and supply chains.  BI will produce comprehensive reports to help identify patterns in consumer behavior.  Additionally, it even has the capability to track the success of offline campaigns.

A fully integrated BI report can accentuate consumers’ online behavior and display analytical results from traditional marketing methods, like whether or not a print advertising campaign achieved the desired results from a target audience, down to a very granular level. Knowing the channels that produced the desired result creates the competitive edge.

Analyzing Activity to Engage Consumers

The intricate reporting breakdown a BI dashboard provides cannot be overlooked.  To aid in analyzing consumer activity, a dashboard can dissect the number of emails that were opened, Facebook “likes,”, Tweets and Re-Tweets, and Re-grams.  This tool provides a wealth of knowledge regarding consumer behavior, marketing techniques or brand messaging responses, and the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign. 

The most prolific consumers, as well as insights into consumer touch points, can be determined by using BI dashboard capabilities.  A number of charts can correlate the likelihood for preferred customers to interact with your brand on social media or make online purchases.  This mode of BI will help identify and reward your brand ambassadors.  Additionally, it can help determine the consumers less involved with your brand so that you can target them for engagement.

The retail industry changes constantly yet a few things remain the same – long-term survival depends on driving sales and profitability as well as the reduction of operational costs.  The data provided by BI confirms whether or not a retailer is targeting the right market based on the consumer behavior analytics.