Transform Your Analytics with Marketing Intelligence
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain marketing intelligence.
- Define key marketing technology terms.
The Modern Marketer
As a marketer, you have a mind-boggling number of interactions with your customers—across different regions, channels, and campaigns—every day. Those interactions make up the increasingly complex customer journeys happening on a variety of channels, like mobile, email, web, point of sale (POS), and ecommerce, among others. And with thousands (yes, thousands) of marketing technology solutions to choose from, you’re likely juggling dozens of different technologies to connect with your customers. In fact, the 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (known as the Martech 5000) counted more than 8,000 marketing technology solutions (and nearly as many vendors). Here’s how the number of solutions has skyrocketed since 2011.
And the number of customer data sources used by marketers keeps climbing, with the median number expected to jump from 10 to 15—in just two years. So, it comes as no surprise that less than half of marketers have a unified view of their data, let alone the ability to access their data in one place.
There has to be a better way, right? That’s where marketing intelligence comes in. Marketing intelligence is a new approach to marketing technology (or MarTech). What is marketing intelligence? You’ve probably heard of business intelligence (BI) solutions—tools that help you make tactical and strategic business decisions by harnessing the power of your data.
These tools, however, aren’t designed to handle the volume or speed that marketers need for their programs. So, marketers like you often don’t have reliable key performance indicators (KPIs) or real-time insights into their data. That’s why many Fortune 500 companies and thousands of innovative brands are turning to marketing intelligence—to bridge the data divide in their business.
Marketing intelligence tools bring together the tools you need with the speed and agility that modern marketing demands.
Marketing Technology Terms to Know
Let’s explore a few key terms and phrases in the evolving marketing intelligence landscape.
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Marketing intelligence: A type of marketer-friendly, AI-powered technology that allows you to analyze, visualize, and activate from one place. In other words, this technology changes the way you see (and use) your data—making your marketing smarter.
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Single source of truth: This is where you can find all (yes, all) of your up-to-date data. It’s usually an unbiased third-party platform (like a marketing intelligence tool) that brings together the many disparate data sources used across your business. This unified view drives smarter insights and interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
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Marketing data harmonization: An automated approach to connecting data from different sources. Data harmonization combines application program interfaces (APIs), AI-enabled data collection, and trusted data models to standardize how data is stored. This ensures that your data is organized and consistent across multiple sources and channels.
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Always-on optimization: The ability to make your data accessible, interactive, and impactful through real-time data visualization, insight, and activation. The end goal is to improve your brand’s performance, business impact, and customer experience—while building a store of knowledge and insight for the long term.
Some of these terms may not be new to you, but what is new is how they’re being applied to marketing. Marketing intelligence and the single source of truth are particularly revolutionary ideas for marketers. Previously, making sense of all this data required specific technical skills (we see you IT experts) and thousands of hours of time spent. By giving you, the marketer, these easy-to-use capabilities—that just require clicks, not code—you have what you need to better answer some of the key questions for your business.
- What’s the ROI of all your marketing spend and activities?
- How do you most effectively spend your next dollar, given your business objectives?
- How do you drive smarter marketing decision-making at scale?
The Marketing Cloud Intelligence Solution
Marketing Cloud Intelligence provides one system of record and insight for marketers like you. Marketing Cloud Intelligence is unique in the market, trusted by many of the biggest companies around the world (including every major agency holding group). It solves common marketing challenges with one source of truth for marketing data, real-time insights, automated reporting, and marketing analytics tools to build alignment and collaboration (both inside and outside of your business).
Want to learn more? Earn your Marketing Cloud Intelligence for Marketing badge.
Follow along in the next unit as we take a closer look at marketing intelligence in action. You can see how easy it is to supercharge growth within your business.