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Industry leaders relying on business intelligence (BI) tools are switching to advanced analytics.
The reason? BI systems are too basic because they focus on hypothesis-based reporting. They leverage historical data and past results to analyze - "what happened?" or descriptive analytics.
But what businesses need to develop in the present competitive scenario is the ability to determine potential future outcomes from current and past actions and trends. And to get here, they must invest in advanced analytics, not BI tools.
Advanced marketing analytics tools allow marketers to extract and stitch, and crunch past and present data from multiple sources on a single, clean dashboard. It leverages predictive and prescriptive analytics to uncover market/customer behavior and trends and offer recommendations. Thus, marketers feel empowered to make informed business decisions directly impacting revenue. Moreover, advanced analytics tools provide insights in an easy-to-digest format that even non-tech-savvy professionals can understand. And that too in no time.
In this post, we will understand how advanced analytics beats standard BI tools hands down. Let's get started.
Why Is BI a Dead Horse?
BI tools offer hindsight of past metrics and visibility into performance. They over-rely on historical data and offers marketers visibility into what might be causing the problem.
With BI-generated reports, businesses can gain insights on -
- What exactly happened in the past?
- What was your SaaS marketing campaign's ROI?
- How often have anomalies happened, and how costly have they been?
However, considering the rapidly changing SaaS business environments, the traditional reporting and visualization methods used in BI cannot accurately discover trends and find patterns.
- With BI, marketers tend to come up with solutions in a reactive manner because these tools don’t offer visibility into what might occur. Because of their limited capabilities, issues are dealt with as they arrive, and context is lacking.
- Consolidating business data across vast databases, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Excel spreadsheets, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, is massive and time-consuming with BI systems.
- Identifying the right KPIs adds to the complexity of business intelligence platforms. Marketers using BI systems need to decide and track everything manually.
- These tools have steep learning curves. This can be problematic for marketers who are usually non-tech-savvy. Marketers need appropriate training to handle BI tools and achieve the best results. This also impacts the time they spend on the creative aspects of their job.
Thus, establishing Power BI for marketing requires technical skills and careful planning. Besides, marketers need to have clarity on what they want to build and achieve. Lack of clarity is worse as it wastes resources and time, thus reducing productivity.
For example, Power BI marketing dashboards and tools might have served organizations well in the past, but their limitations make them unfit for today's marketplace.
In fact, according to Forrester, only 20% of enterprise decision-makers use business intelligence (BI) tools.
BI tools aren’t the right fit for your SaaS business because -
- They use historical data that falls short of answering insightful questions to make accurate decisions for the present and future.
- They require resource-intensive analysis. Marketers should stitch data from myriad sources and curate vital data points based on KPIs.
- They do not provide the expected level of detail or granularity that marketers need to boost the ROI of their marketing efforts.
It's time for organizations to extend beyond the traditional siloed analysis that BI offers and embrace advanced analytics.
Why Switch to Advanced Analytics?
As the pace of SaaS businesses accelerates and competitive marketspaces tighten, industry leaders need detailed data analysis. This transition is pivotal to meeting strategic business goals.
Advanced analytics provides an insightful summary of past and present data and leverages sophisticated modeling methods like predictive and prescriptive analytics to predict future events.
It offers recommendations and next-best actions (NBAs) to help them optimize marketing campaigns like a pro. With advanced analytics, marketers can figure out answers to the following.
- What were the past market/customer trends?
- What was the marketing campaign ROI in the previous quarter?
- What are the current market trends?
- What are the most crucial KPIs?
- What is the current marketing campaign ROI?
- What if these trends continue?
- What will happen next?
- How to maximize the ROI of the marketing campaign?
Having specific answers to these questions can be a massive competitive advantage.
Here are the top reasons SaaS businesses should invest in advanced analytics.
1. Leverages Advanced Techniques
Unlike BI tools that use the most basic descriptive modeling method, advanced analytics leverage techniques like predictive and prescriptive modeling.
Here's what differentiates them -
- Descriptive Analytics: It uses historical data to determine market trends and customer needs.
- Predictive Analytics: It helps predict future trends and outcomes using historical and current business data combined with machine learning and data mining techniques.
For instance, marketers can use predictive analytics to analyze marketing data to identify the most profitable customer segments, demand for SaaS products in upcoming years, and more.
- Prescriptive Analytics: Once businesses can predict potential outcomes, the next step should be to achieve and control them. That's where prescriptive AI comes in. This advanced marketing analytics empowers SaaS marketers with actionable recommendations to achieve marketing goals.
Based on the predictive analytics results, prescriptive analytics offers insights into variables that can be improved or manipulated to achieve the desired outcomes.
Here's an example that reflects the power of marketing analytics over standard BI tools.
Scenario: A marketer wants to find regions that will contribute to maximum website sales in the next quarter.
BI Tools vs. Advanced Marketing Analytics:
2. Helps Optimize Marketing Campaigns and the Next Best Actions (NBAs)
Unlike BI tools limited to data visualization and reporting, advanced analytics processes data using data mining, machine learning, predictive and prescriptive modeling, etc.
This advanced approach allows marketers to dig deeper into customer behavior and patterns.
As stated in the above-shared example, advanced analytics help marketers pinpoint what customers are looking for and suggest the next-best actions. They can leverage the granular insights to identify ways to boost customer engagement, optimize marketing campaigns, and trigger brand loyalty.
For instance, marketers can use advanced analytics to predict ad spend or sessions on websites to cover blindspots and track progress on goals in real-time rather than scrambling at the last minute. This can help them create targeted SaaS marketing campaigns and save a hefty amount on campaigns that don't work for the audience.
3. Addresses Serious Issues
Advanced analytics provides a holistic view of a firm's past, present, and future marketing scenario. The absence of this feature in BI tools can lead to poor decision-making.
For instance, marketers can turn to a BI tool to see if there was a decline in sales in the last quarter. But these tools are not apt to dissect what factors led to that outcomes and what can be done to boost sales in the upcoming quarter.
Advanced analytics helps them bridge this gap.
The improved accuracy of data-driven analytics helps marketers identify and manage risks and strengthens their decision-making. Companies can safeguard themselves from costly blunders arising from faulty analysis and boost marketing campaign ROI.
4. Empowers Marketers to Identify Growth Opportunities
According to Gartner, advanced analytics are backed by advanced statistical and mathematical models, including pattern matching, complex event processing, and network and cluster analysis.
This allows advanced analytics users to unearth potential challenges, discover upcoming trends and opportunities in the volatile market, and adopt marketing strategies aligning with them.
For instance, marketers can monitor the ever-evolving customer demands and update their existing SaaS products and services while innovating new ones according to their needs.
Collecting and analyzing large amounts of data in one place and implementing next-best actions (NBAs) can help them achieve desired goals and gain an edge over competitors using traditional BI.
5. Saves Time and Effort
BI tools work when the data is relevant and accurate. For that, marketers should put effort and resources and filter valuable data from non-essential.
With so much customer and marketing data to sift through, it's essential to have an easy-to-use solution that helps find the needle in a haystack.
The key benefit of advanced analytics implementation is automation which helps marketers identify data-driven, valuable insights within minutes.
Advanced analytics thus saves their time, effort, and resources while ensuring complete accuracy.
BI versus Advanced Analytics: The Final Showdown
Here's a table summarizing how advanced analytics scores over BI tools.
Make Revenue-Based Decisions with Revlitix: The Perfect Tool for Your Advanced Analytics Stack
Marketers must stay updated on market trends, customer behavior, the competitive landscape, and how their SaaS product fits in.
They should stitch and crunch data from multiple sources and create an efficient, clean, centralized data ecosystem to draw relevant conclusions.
Standard BI tools cannot automate this process.
Marketers using BI tools should create manual reports by examining and filtering complex data. This typically takes a long time, and the insights can lose relevance in rapidly changing business environments.
In such instances, the advanced analytics-based revenue marketing platform - Revlitix can help.
Powered by advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, Revlitix makes the effort-intensive task pretty straightforward.
The platform allows marketers to pull data from multiple sources and store it in a centralized location for easy access.
The best part? The state-of-the-art revenue marketing platform effortlessly tracks crucial KPIs across multiple marketing channels and millions of data combinations to offer actionable, relevant insights and the next best steps.
This can prove helpful in debugging your marketing funnel, creating a personalized customer experience, achieving precise targeting, spending less on campaigns, and acquiring and retaining audiences.
Conclusion
SaaS is a cut-throat business to be in and companies that aren’t creative, intuitive, and fast will not thrive here. Standing out in this industry is tough.
And in such tough scenarios, you wouldn’t want to count on the traditional hindsight BI tools that offer good visibility on the road ahead.
To stay competitive, you need to rely on advanced analytics tools like Revlitix that can support your team in the process of making strategic and informed decisions that impact revenue.
So, turbocharge your marketing strategy with the one-stop, power-packed revenue marketing platform - Revlitix.
