Marketing intelligence refers to the systems, skills and processes that allow marketing organizations to make smart, data-informed decisions, usually through well-designed reports, KPIs, dashboards. For our purpose, we hone in on a particularly important marketing question: how to allocate their marketing spend most effectively based on the ROI and incremental value provided by their different marketing investments.
In order to make informed, holistic decisions specifically around allocating spend, marketers need to look at all aspects of the marketing problem. Marketers thus have to capture information across multiple marketing domains, including customers (which includes current customers and prospective customers), channels, media, customer behavior, sales and more. Marketing intelligence consolidates all this information into a centralized location so that the marketer has an overarching view that they can use to make smart and informed decisions regarding their marketing initiatives and spend.
Note: The use of the term “Marketing intelligence“ can be confusing because it is used quite broadly. For instance, you can read various trade journals and magazines to receive “marketing intelligence“ around the latest developments in the industry. This is not what we mean by “Marketing Intelligence“ though.
Salesforce.com, a salesforce automation tool, may provide some marketing intelligence around the prospect funnel. Marketo, a marketing automation tool, may provide some marketing intelligence around customer engagement on the marketer’s email or landing pages. Many of these martech tools might even have sophisticated KPI trackers, visualization or querying platforms to provide intelligence to specific questions in marketing.
But for our purposes, these are not true “Marketing Intelligence“ systems because they focus on very specific problem siloes rather than providing systems that allow marketers to receive marketing intelligence across the larger marketing universe – across channels, campaigns, devices, audience types and vendors – as a whole – which is necessary for answering the larger marketing question focused on smarter allocation of media spend.
