Marketing intelligence: Smart insights for better decision-making

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4 min read

Marketing intelligence is crucial to align processes, gain an overview over all activities and results, and therefore push the right channels, messages, and campaigns.

Content:

  1. What is Marketing Intelligence?
  2. Ask the right questions to get the right data
  3. How can you make use of Marketing Intelligence?

What is Marketing Intelligence?

Marketing intelligence describes the use of company, market, and customer data to reach better decisions, define next steps, and predict customer and market behavior.

Just like business intelligence (BI), it can help companies to make decisions based on measurable information and over time become better at predicting outcomes and focusing on activities, target groups, and products and services that gain the best results at the lowest-possible costs.

A marketing intelligence system is usually a platform that connects data sources, analyzes them and turns them into individualized reports that help different stakeholders make the right decision.

Ask the right questions to get the right data

Get back to overview

A good platform needs a good setup to perform at its best. That's why it's important for you to

  • identify all necessary data streams and connect them to the platform
  • identify your KPI and define how to measure them
  • define how to connect data to get helpful insights

Asking questions can help you get to answers which activities, channels, etc. should be measured and what KPI are crucial for your marketing team (and business) to achieve your goals.

Market Data

  • What does your competition do?
  • How has your industry developed in the last years?
  • Did specific events (trends, disruptions, competitors) change the market?
  • What are the benchmarks?

Marketing Data

  • Which marketing channels do you have in place and how are they connected?
  • Which marketing activities have received the best outcomes (leads, purchases, engagement)?
  • How are your marketing activities connected to sales (and other business units), e.g., via Closed Loop-methods?
  • Which content has been most popular and/or successful?
  • Which personas drive the most revenue?

Product & Service Data

  • Which products and services sell best?
  • Who purchases specific products and services?
  • Where do specific products and services sell best (markets, locations, online or offline)?

Audience & Customer Data

  • How does your audience reach you (social media, website, marketplaces, etc.)?
  • What is your audience engagement?
  • What does your audience do before turning into customers?
  • How (and where) do customers churn?
  • Where does your audience research purchases?
  • How often do your customers purchase?
  • How much do your customers spend on average?

Business Data

  • How much marketing budget did you have in recent years?
  • Which channels did generate most leads / engagement / purchases?
  • How are your different business units connected?
  • How do your marketing goals align with company, sales, other goals?

How can you make use of Marketing Intelligence?

Get back to overview

See what your competitors do - and do it better or differently

Identify your toughest competitors and see what differentiates (and unites) you. See what they do differently and take inspiration of their activities - either by adapting them or by trying something completely new.

Get an overview on your Share of Market and find out why customers prefer your competitors.

Get an overview on the market - and predict its changes

See whether your market is currently stable or in flux and find out what to look out for in the future. Gain a perspective on how current and past events affect your markets and identify new markets to expand your business (e.g., by adding new locations, new channels, products, etc.).

Optimize your activities

Marketing intelligence helps you to get an overview of all campaigns, channels and activities, see their results, and compare them to each other. That way, it's much easier to allocate budgets and resources so you push what works and can optimize (or drop) what didn't.

Get a 360°-view of your customers across all channels

Find out what your customers are interested in, where they do their research, how they contact you and what their buying behavior looks like. Even more, connect sales, service, and commerce data and get more insights into purchase requirements, pain points, and reasons to churn.

Gain more transparency over your marketing workflows

Identify gaps in your customer journeys, between business units and see where you can use automation (or need the human touch) to reduce workloads and optimize customer experiences. Find out where you might experience issues due to decision bottlenecks. Identify the best activities, content, and messages and make use of AI to create personalized experiences. Expand your marketing communication with chatbots, conversational marketing, personalized websites and mails.

Align your marketing with company KPI

Implement a closed loop reporting, so you can trace your customer's engagement with marketing material from their first interaction on. Create more transparency over your successes along the entire buying cycle to defend your budget and strengthen your standing within the company. Align your marketing goals with the company strategy.


Salesforce is the perfect platform to align not only your marketing processes but also support them with marketing intelligence and connect them to your other business units in a smart multi-cloud environment. Find out more.

Your smart data platform

by Juliane Waack

Juliane Waack is Editor in Chief at DIGITALL and writes about the digital transformation, megatrends and why a healthy culture is essential for a successful business.

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