In a fiercely-competitive digital landscape, it is no longer sufficient for companies to offer the best products to set themselves apart from competitors. Building an ironclad brand image is more important than ever for the modern marketing executive; effective marketing is the cornerstone of building trust in not just products, but the organization overall.
Traditional marketing was rooted in the idea of finding commonalities among groups of consumers and tailoring content to them. The rise of big data analytics and business intelligence (BI) allowed firms to easily gather and analyze large amounts of data to that end. This process supported decision making to some extent but lacked deeper insight into the actual decision-making process. The past several years saw the introduction of decision intelligence (DI), a practice augmenting traditional BI with machine learning and predictive analytics (PAML), a subset of modern AI.
In order to remain competitive in a world where organizations are locked in an analytics arms race, marketing leaders must prudently leverage decision intelligence to create internal cultures of data-driven decisions, ultimately generating more productive and fulfilled teams. With proper training and fervor, marketing teams can understand customers’ behavior better than they understand it themselves, and project a brand image consistent with these insights.
Key Benefits of Decision Intelligence
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DI allows for marketing leaders to be proactive rather than reactive
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Businesses make more intelligent advertising decisions through DI-generated insights
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DI-powered automation improves employee productivity and satisfaction
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Real-time risk monitoring enables proactive mitigation
3 Key Uses
Real-time metric tracking
In past eras, marketing departments relied solely on historical metrics to enhance decision making. With advances in cloud computing technology came the ability to analyze live feeds of data as they are ingested, unlocking a new age of real-time DI insights marked by the ability of leaders to proactively anticipate changing market and customer behaviors. For example, when the HelloFresh brand runs a partnership with a celebrity, they track customer interactions in real time. This allows leaders to make adjustments to audience targeting and pricing, accordingly, capturing a significant return on investment while doing so.
Increased Reaction Speed
The ability to quickly react to changing market and customer behavior is now critical to success. With a finite sum of customer attention in the market, it is critical to leverage AI and other cutting-edge technologies to capture as large an audience as possible. This is especially important to brands in entertainment, such as Universal Pictures, where celebrity news and gossip drastically affect business interests. AI-driven decision intelligence tools monitor the business in the press and send both alerts and recommendations if something of notice occurs, allowing a quicker and more effective response to protect the company’s best interests.
Personalization
In the past, marketing leaders would segment their audiences into large groups based on shared characteristics such as demographics, often leading to ineffective targeted advertising. With advances in AI technology, marketing departments can shrink these groups down to the individual level, tailoring ads directly to the preferences of each customer. By tracking individuals’ browsing and purchase histories, companies like Target intelligently personalize their product recommendations. Highlighting customers’ preferences makes shopping a hyper-personalized experience, increasing the ease with which consumers shop.
In order to remain competitive in a world where organizations are locked in an analytics arms race, marketing leaders must prudently leverage predictive analytics and machine learning to streamline their decision-making process. Ultimately, they must leverage these technologies to drive the creation of a culture of intelligent decision making, serving as a competitive differentiator in the marketplace when executed strategically.
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