Marketing leaders rely on BI to improve campaigns and ROI

Marketing leaders across Europe make good use of business intelligence (BI) to achieve better performance and return on investment (ROI) from their strategies. This is the conclusion of a survey of executives at 350 companies in seven countries and across four industries. The survey was commissioned by SAS, the leading business intelligence (BI) vendor.

"Marketing leaders use BI and this fact cements their leadership position. Across the EMEA region, and across the industries examined, BI helps marketing divisions align themselves with business strategy," said Phil Winters, Vice-President of Customer Intelligence at SAS. The top benefit, according to the survey's findings, is being able to optimise customer communications, followed by generating action-ready insight based on customer value metrics.

The study, carried out by IDC's CMO Advisory Research area, examined marketing's use of BI tools for improving planning and execution and how BI can lead to better organisational performance. Two trends were identified in this process: the proliferation of more niche segments, and the fragmentation of media and content - and thus the channels - to reach the intended audiences. These trends are making it increasingly more challenging for marketing organisations to conduct targeted campaigns to qualified audiences.

As marketing organisations face increasing pressure for improved accountability and alignment with budget, their key objective is the ability to provide insight into current and forecasted needs of individual customers and market segments - and act upon those needs. The survey results indicate that marketing organisations that invest in BI technology and utilise it efficiently also achieve better financial results and a higher return of marketing investment.

"What we find remarkable is that marketing organisations that use BI tools show a 16% higher ability to provide insight into customer needs and are more effective in predicting customer behaviour by 24% than those who don't," said Winters. SAS provides customers with business intelligence and customer intelligence solutions. These solutions help marketing organisations analyse and measure the success of their activities as part of their performance management, "which ultimately keeps the marketing objectives in alignment with the corporate strategy," Winters added.

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"A marketing organisation's effectiveness is directly impacted by its ability to leverage customer/market insight through the usage and benefits of BI applications," said Rich Vancil, Vice-President of CMO Advisory Research, IDC. "Marketing leaders, represented by one-third of the study's participants, leverage customer and market insight, including prediction of customer behaviour, to achieve greater effectiveness in customer retention, acquisition of new customers, revenue growth and market share expansion. The consequence of greater effectiveness in each of these areas is improved marketing ROI."

SAS commissioned IDC Research to conduct the research in Germany, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Poland, UK and Denmark across the retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services industries. A white paper sponsored by SAS was written by IDC summarising the results of the survey. The white paper is available as free download at www.sas.com.

The survey and the findings were presented at SAS Forum International, the annual premier event for enterprise business intelligence taking place in Geneva, from 16 to 18 May. The event, which features more than 140 customer presentations and forums has attracted 2 000 business leaders, managers and IT professionals, making it the largest business intelligence (BI) conference outside the United States.