What is marketing intelligence?

As a marketer, how do you ensure that every decision you make is backed by actionable insight rather than guesswork or outdated information? This is where marketing intelligence comes in.

However, the overhyped promises of AI, the availability of too much data, and a surplus of data tools in the market have made navigating the world of marketing intelligence increasingly complex.

The truth is that marketing intelligence has the potential to revolutionize how your business approaches data, but it’s also something that many companies are not fully equipped to implement. If you don’t have a solid infrastructure for marketing intelligence, you could be missing out on valuable insights that can truly transform your marketing strategy.

Unlike marketing analytics, which looks at historical data to decipher performance, marketing intelligence looks at both internal and external data sources to draw insights and make predictions about future performance.

Getting started with marketing intelligence

Supermetrics invented the technology to pull data from third-party platforms into reporting tools. In 2023, Supermetrics introduced the marketing intelligence platform designed to support all four steps of the marketing intelligence workflow:

1. Connect: the first step is to integrate data from various marketing sources and platforms into a centralized location that makes it easy to glean insights. Some businesses with highly technical team members and large, complex data needs may opt to build their own data lake or warehouse, but a spreadsheet or data visualization tool will fit most needs.

2. Manage: once you’ve integrated your data into a data platform of choice, your job is to refine, organize, and blend your data — a process known as data transformation. Data can be put to its best use when it’s clean, well-organized, and properly structured. At the core of this is by using consistent campaign naming conventions across platforms.

3. Analyze: now for the fun part — once you’ve collected your data and ensured it’s clean, it’s time to pull insights that have real business implications. Analysis is best done in a way that’s visually appealing, easy to share, and produces actionable insights that you and your team can apply.

4. Activate: in the activate stage, you’re applying insights to marketing efforts. A good example of this is ad strategy adjustments. After learning about certain behavior cues, you can use a Conversion API (CAPI) to build a new audience segmentation or attribution model. This helps you further monitor and refine your efforts.

What are the benefits of marketing intelligence?

Agency benefits:

• Improved client satisfaction:
  • Better-performing campaigns lead to happier clients and longer engagements. Plus, with holistic marketing data, agencies can clearly demonstrate how their strategies contribute to business growth, proving their value to clients. This results in better reporting, stronger case studies, and an easier path to upselling additional services.
• Saved resources:
  • Agencies manage multiple clients and campaigns across various platforms. Automating data extraction, transformation, and building reports streamlines the full reporting workflow, reducing manual effort and freeing up valuable hours. This efficiency allows agencies to scale their operations and take on more customers, increasing their margins.
• Improved ROI:
  • By using marketing intelligence, agencies can track client campaign performance in real-time and shift budgets to the most profitable channels. This data-driven approach maximizes returns, showcasing the agency’s ability to drive higher ROI and justifying increased budgets from clients.
• Reduced waste in ad spend:
  • By eliminating guesswork and identifying underperforming campaigns early, marketing intelligence done right helps marketers shift focus to what works. This ensures that ad spending isn't wasted on ineffective tactics, allowing quick pivots and minimizing losses.
• Differentiation and Competitive Advantage
  • In a crowded agency landscape, offering superior data insights positions your agency as a strategic partner, not just an executor. This unique selling point drives client acquisition and retention, helping agencies stand out from competitors.

Brand benefits:

• The marketing team is seen as a growth center (not as a cost center)
  • Marketing teams can create clear, consistent reports to share across teams, leadership, and stakeholders. This transparency helps marketing teams demonstrate their direct contributions to business growth, build trust, and secure additional resources for future initiatives.
• Better data governance:
  • With structured data management, brands can ensure their data represents their unique business goals and objectives.
• More time for long-term planning
  • With less time spent cleaning, organizing, and analyzing data, marketing teams can focus on strategic work. This boost in productivity ensures that marketing efforts are impactful and aligned with larger business growth goals.
• Uplift in revenue through better attribution
  • Understanding the full customer journey allows brands to connect marketing efforts directly to revenue outcomes. Accurate attribution empowers teams to refine their strategies and deliver measurable results,
• Improved campaign performance
  • Robust data insights allow brands to refine targeting, messaging, and strategies, leading to stronger campaign results. By focusing on what resonates with audiences, brands can achieve higher engagement, better conversion rates, and better performance.

Common challenges marketers face without marketing intelligence

Without marketing intelligence, many businesses face challenges that prevent them from reaching their full potential:

• Data overload: You may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data at your disposal, especially when it’s scattered across different platforms. Without a clear way to bring it all together, you’re left with fragmented insights that are difficult to act on.
• Slow decision-making: If your data is not organized or analyzed in real time, you may find that decisions take too long to make. This delay can result in missed opportunities and poor campaign performance.
• Competitive disadvantage: Without the ability to track and analyze competitor strategies, you risk falling behind. Marketing intelligence gives you the insights you need to stay competitive by identifying gaps in the market and potential opportunities.
• Unclear ROI: Without proper attribution models, it’s difficult to determine exactly where your results are coming from. Whether it’s from paid ads, organic search, or social media, you need a clear understanding of which channels are driving the most value.

What are best practices and pitfalls in marketing intelligence?

When investing in marketing intelligence, here are some best practices:

Do...

• Promote a data-driven culture: Get in the practice of basing decisions on data analysis, fostering a culture where marketing intelligence is valued and systematically used.
• Integrate intelligence into operations: Use marketing intelligence to inform decision-making processes, optimize resources, and improve customer-oriented operations.
• Establish a dedicated team: Promote collaboration and communication around collecting, analyzing, and implementing marketing intelligence.
• Stay informed of marketing trends: Continuously gather information on the latest consumer behaviors, industry changes, and emerging opportunities in marketing intelligence.

When implementing marketing intelligence, there are several pitfalls to avoid to ensure success:

• Data quality: Relying on inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete data can lead to flawed insights and poor decision-making. Always ensure that your data is clean, accurate, and up to date.
• Siloed data: Failing to integrate data from different platforms and marketing channels can create fragmented insights. Data must be centralized for a unified view, enabling better, actionable insights.
• Inadequate training: Investing in marketing intelligence tools without proper training for your team can lead to poor utilization and incorrect usage of the data tools. 
• Underestimating the importance of integration: Disparate systems or a lack of integration between marketing intelligence tools and other platforms can hinder data flow. Ensure your tools and systems are well-integrated to provide comprehensive insights.

Building a business case for marketing intelligence

To cultivate a culture of marketing intelligence within an organization, you need to demonstrate its value to your business. It is essential to create an operating model for the team where data is the foundation of decision-making and to encourage employee data literacy. To make data analytics more approachable, you can set up a dedicated team responsible for collecting, analyzing and presenting marketing intelligence. The team should have the necessary skills, resources, and expertise in data analytics. Also, you can make it a habit to socialize data analytics in meetings and help team members understand how data is being interpreted and leads to different marketing actions.

As much as marketing is an art and a science, data is the backbone of marketing intelligence. Most businesses could benefit from marketing intelligence as a practice especially as it has evolved out of marketing analytics and has been advancing with AI and Machine Learning (ML). You can build a strong foundation for marketing intelligence to thrive by demonstrating the potential for improved decision-making, pointing out cost-effectiveness, and presenting success stories and case studies.

Conclusion

Marketing intelligence tools have redefined what is possible for marketers and business leaders by transforming data into actionable strategies to improve ROI and stay competitive. When we studied our own data, as well as the data of a select number of customers, within the Supermetrics Marketing Intelligence Platform, we saw marketing efficiency improve by 25% and conversions by 30%.

These actionable insights enable you to craft personalized experiences, anticipate customer needs, and shape the future of your brand by forming lasting connections with your audience.

Supermetrics’ Marketing Intelligence platform is the easiest way to transition from standard marketing analytics to sophisticated marketing intelligence.