Using BI Analytics for Marketing in the Retail Industry

Using BI analytics for marketing in the retail industry is the key to revealing relevant insights, increasing profitability, and improving brand awareness. The right BI analytics can help uncover new markets, identify areas for future development, track the responses to marketing strategies, and much more. 

The importance of marketing analytics has continued to grow with the prevalence of online retailers.  Both online and in-store business benefit tremendously from the ability to analyze performance changes as a result of marketing activity.

Meeting Customer Needs

If you are in the retail industry, you are well aware that business is about meeting the needs of customers.  Analytics that determine whether or not customer needs are met can be used to increase customer satisfaction as well as revenue.  Product reviews, surveys, and interviews are some useful tools for this task.  Additionally, tools such as Google Trends help identify what customers are searching for. In addition, creating online focus groups, inviting customers to like your business on Facebook, and follow on Twitter are fast, easy, and inexpensive ways to ask your customers questions. 

Predictive Analytics for Demand Forecasting

To remain competitive as a retailer, understanding demand is imperative.  One area of BI predictive analytics is known as demand forecasting. It works by estimating the quantity of a product your consumers are likely to buy.  This goes way beyond taking an educated guess.  Predictive analytics researchers historical sales data or current test market data.  Keep in mind that, it’s important the data used is accurate, or it could steer your business in the wrong direction. 

Monitoring Market Trends

Market trend analytics determines if a market is growing, stagnant, or declining and how fast the movement is occurring. While understanding the size of your particular market is important, knowing whether or not it is trending up or down is critical.  Monitoring market trends can be done by running a business experiment to see how the market would look and the impact on your business in either a growing or declining market.  Other helpful tools are focus groups and customer surveys.

Identify the Gaps

Rather than using Business Intelligence to analyze what you are selling, use it to analyze what you are not selling.  Gap analysis allows you to identify the gaps in sales by allowing a comparative analysis of different product groups that are selling – or not selling.  For example, pretend you are a marketer for a company that sells pet foods.  Using gap analysis, you can run a report that shows which pet store customers are purchasing goldfish but not goldfish food.  The pet store has to be getting their goldfish food from someone, but it obviously is not you.  With this knowledge, you can create targeted marketing campaigns to those pet stores who are not buying your goldfish food to try to win that business from competitors. 

These are just a few examples of how to effectively use BI for marketing purposes.  The retail industry is highly competitive and in order to stay on top, you must successfully market your product or service.  With the help of BI analytics, massive sets of data are managed and the results help retailers understand how to best sector their markets and target marketing budgets in order to succeed as a business.