by Guest Post
Business intelligence is among the most powerful tools that any business can use. They help companies stay ahead of their competition, as well as optimize potential revenue streams. In addition, it enables you to organize raw data into something that offers easily accessible information you can use to make decisions.
Having the right BI and BI tools can give you the edge you need to win, especially with your sales and marketing. Here’s how business intelligence can empower your sales and marketing and what you can do to take full advantage of it.
Business Intelligence Increases Organizational Efficiency
Business intelligence is more than simple analytics data, software, and the tools that come with it. When it comes to sales and marketing, you want everything to run like clockwork. With the right intelligence, you can create data to help with a more efficient workflow with your team.
BI provides leaders and teams the ability to access data that gives a complete overview of their organization. This data includes the company’s operational capacity, processes, systems, and ability benchmarks of every department – even every employee.
With a holistic view of how the entire organization runs, teams can develop efficiency models and improve company workflow. Some adjustments here and there might mean nothing to some companies, but they can transform into a few percent increase down the line.
BI Powers Data-Driven Decisions
Company-wide business intelligence is crucial towards data-driven decisions. No company can survive randomly guessing what’s the next move, where to optimize, and what direction they need to go. So instead, successful companies use data to predict the company’s direction, from financial data to customer data to even productivity analytics.
Marketing, for example, needs accurate market data to understand customer segments. They need business intelligence to identify proper verticals and the opportunities that come with them. For sales, you want data on customer trends, buying cycles, and even the churn rates that you have.
With the data for these areas in play, management can decide where to focus their efforts. It can help them make decisions based on numbers and insight, like the geolocation of where products sell the most or which ones to discontinue.
Sure, over-reliance on data to make your decisions can be problematic, as it can reduce the agility you need to react to your market. This makes it essential for any company to understand how to make the most of their BI and use it as a starting point for creative problem-solving.
Business Intelligence Helps Increase ROI
Return on investment or ROI is a must in any organization. No department can survive without proving to the company that any ROI is generated from their team, so business intelligence offers such data to them. In the same vein, marketing and sales teams need BI to align with organizational strategy to improve their income generation and reduce costs.
BI enables companies’ marketing and sales to set crucial key performance indicators (KPI) and metrics for success. When these align with the company’s strategy, teams will get precise results on their performance and see adjustments needed to improve ROI.
Business intelligence helps boost return on investment by aligning marketing activities, processes, solutions, and outcomes with established strategic objectives. This helps drive accountability within the team and identify areas where business efficiency can be further improved.
Sales teams can also use BI to analyze how the organization’s manufacturing process works. By doing so, they can create predictive models that align supply chain decisions with existing demand, helping maximize production efficiency when it’s needed.
BI Tools Create Powerful Data Dashboards
Companies who use business intelligence rely on dashboards – reporting tools that aggregate analytics information to enable teams to monitor and adjust business practices. They communicate insights and show anything that the team needs to be concerned about, especially trends that can help improve marketing and sales.
The right BI dashboard can help collate all the data you need, combine them into a data warehouse, and answer queries as required by an end-user. This will help with better reporting efficiency down the line and condense pages upon pages of information into a single page snapshot.
Business intelligence dashboards should also help cut your marketing team’s analysis time by a significant margin. When it does, it can communicate how the business is truly performing and increase your team’s informational awareness. It can also assist in visualizing complex relationships between KPI and their real-life viability.
Business Intelligence Enhances Customer Experience
Customer experience is king when it comes to sales and marketing teams. Business intelligence impacts this experience, as well as customer satisfaction towards products and services. This fact comes from several vital touchpoints that every team needs to keep tabs on.
For example, BI can help educate customers regarding details that most clients are not privy to. If a customer contacts you, chances are they already have the information they need to shop around for better products and services. Business intelligence can help you leverage what the customer truly wants.
BI also helps you track sales that you win and lose and service experiences within your organization. In addition, you’ll find detailed reports on market trends, market segments, and shifts in trends that will tell you which patterns lead to better customer satisfaction down the line.
BI Identifies Fresh Opportunities And Helps You Act On Them
Business intelligence gives marketing teams an insight into the company and knowledge of its own capabilities. A marketing team that knows what the company can and cannot do and its potential can show the right message the company needs to deliver. In addition, BI helps identify market conditions and see where new opportunities exist.
To gain a competitive advantage, a company needs to know what trends are going upwards and respond to them faster than the competition. Agile marketing practices rely on down-the-line decisions, as well as reduce potential flanking. Data from BI helps decision-makers react as swiftly as possible without fear of crucial mistakes.
With correct reactions to market trends, it helps the organization identify the most profitable customers. Marketing teams can retarget their efforts with little hesitation, while sales teams can adjust their conversion paths. It anticipates customer needs and provides the best possible time to enter and exit a market.
The Bottom Line
Business intelligence in sales and marketing can be crucial in articulating strategies that work. It will help build business roadmaps and create data that will generate measurable ROI down the line. BI is beyond a buzzword – it is a systematic way of decision-making that can spell success or failure for your company.
Sophia Young is a Content Writer and Copywriter who recently quit a non-writing job to finally be able to tell stories and paint the world through her words.
by Guest Post
The importance of social media marketing for small businesses has increased substantially in recent years, as more and more companies look to get their message out to as wide an audience as possible.
Let’s be honest, Instagram is one of the top social media channels without a doubt. But as a small business owner can you use this platform to get the best results?
Yes, you can. It’s no secret that Instagram has become a channel used by some of the largest companies in Tanzania. And these large companies have used their brands to push themselves to the next level and dominate the space on Instagram.
Currently, Instagram seems to be the latest and greatest way to market your business. However, it’s still a challenge if you don’t know what you’re doing. This is especially true if your business is relatively small.
Small business owners have a lot on their plates, doing everything they can to stay in business. One important task that often gets neglected is marketing their business online
The main reasons why small businesses should consider using Instagram for marketing are; building your brand, helping people understand your business, and connecting with new customers.
Is there a way for the little guy to get in the action? Yes, this post is written specifically for small businesses to help you determine how you can use Instagram to grow your business, and avoid some of the common traps that other small businesses have fallen into when trying to use Instagram to their advantage.
1. Start with your bio
Did you know, it takes less than 7 seconds for someone to see your bio?
Your bio is the first thing that potential customers see on your profile when they search for you.
We all want our brands to be approachable, relatable, and memorable. This is why bios are so important – not only do they help create an emotional connection with your target audience, but they also make finding you online easier. When people read your bio, they have a better idea of who you are, what you do, and what makes you different from everyone else.
The best way to fill your bio is by being authentic. Make sure you use real information, such as brand name, rather than making an impersonal bio.
Even if you think your bio is perfect, just re-write it a couple of times until it’s better suited for the role you want to play.
2. Find your ideal customers.
One of the best ways to find your ideal customers is to look at user accounts on Instagram and look at what they post about the businesses they’re following.
You can even analyze which accounts they follow based on the types of posts they send out, the images they post (e.g., product shots, promo photos), and the keywords they use in their captions. This is a powerful analytical tool and it can help you find the right Instagram followers for your business very quickly.
3. Create content
You know your target audience, but do you know what kind of content will make them engage with your brand on Instagram?
Content is king. If you want to drive leads and engagement, you need to create content that addresses their issues and concerns.
Whether it’s about their favorite sports team or their latest fashion trends, make sure your posts are designed to engage with your audience as effectively as possible. Bloggers who create content regularly are more likely to see higher engagement on their accounts.
4. Post-high-quality photos
The trickiest part of creating product photos isn’t thinking about what you want the pictures of your products to look like.
It’s thinking about how you will get the product photograph right. When you take a group photo of all your products, everyone looks like they belong in the same photo.
But if you all take different pictures of the product separately, with slightly different lighting and angles overlaid on top of each other – no one looks like they were taken at the same time.
Don’t worry, you don’t need professional skills or even a good camera to succeed. Your phone creates magic with this simple application; Adobe Lightroom, Canva, Pixlr, Inshot, and PicsArt.
These are applications that are very simple to use and edit your content through your smartphone.
5. Use hashtags
You want your Instagram posts to be memorable and easy to share, so use Instagram hashtags that will help you stand out from your competitors.
Be strategic about how you use them. For example, don’t use the same tag three times in a row. Or choose one that’s highly popular among your users.
The key is knowing when to use them and when to avoid them. First make sure people are using them, stay relevant to the brand and create branded hashtags. Also, monitor competitors and key industry figures and use event-specific hashtags.
The proper using hashtags in your social media drive more people to your page. Also, it interacts with your content and expands your brand presence.
Conclusion
With the right Instagram marketing strategy, you can make your business look more professional and generate more leads. This means more sales and more money in the bank!
There is a lot that can be done by simply creating an Instagram account for your small business but it’s not enough to just pop out a picture with your company logo on it and call it a day. There are so many Instagram accounts out there and so many ways you can promote your business with just a few clicks of Instagram.
More and more people are using Instagram to discover brands, learn about new products and services and connect with others who share the same interests as they do. For this reason alone, it’s worthwhile checking into how Instagram can help your business grow.
This article was written by Nasra Mohammed, a Digital Marketing Specialist at Bridging Technologies Ltd.
by Guest Post
Article written by Eunice Tossy
Social media has become an important part of our everyday life. Worldwide, there are 3.80 billion social media users.
In Tanzanian, a large number of youths are avid users of these social platforms such Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. We use these tools to stay connected and informed. But most of us tend to be so well informed about issues surrounding our celebrities.
We are active on social media, and that’s not always a bad thing. But are we making the most of it?
You have probably heard about people who have won scholarships, competitions, deals, got job and all these exciting opportunities after seeing them from social media, and you were left asking, ‘which Instagram are these winners using?’ Well, they get information about opportunities the same way you get information about Diamond Platnumz divorcing Tanasha.
If you don’t want to miss out on important opportunities, or want to do more with social media, here is how you can benefit from these platforms, the same ones that winners are using:
Join groups or conversations that resonate with you
Don’t be up to date with everything. That’s draining. Be well informed about issues that really matter to you. Be it social change, world issues, sports or anything else. You need to have an information diet, you can’t take anything in. Focus and engage on content that resonate with you only. Celebrity dramas is entertaining but time wasting.
Find your tribe and connect with them
Follow people who do things you love doing. If you’re a digital marketer, find and connect with people in the digital marketing industry. You can also have virtual mentors on social media who inspire you and give you lessons through their posts. because all these people who live our dream lives, post about it. Why not learn and be mentored?
Brand yourself well
I used to hate this word, because I believe people are not brands. But again, your social media persona should just be you. Don’t fake things because people will notice. Understand who you aspire to become and try your level best to stay out of trouble on social media.
Follow accounts that post opportunities
There are a lot of accounts and blogs that share opportunities and organizations that do things that you like. In 2018, I went to Malawi to work with When the Saints, an organization that works with girls who have been sexually abused. I got into contact with them after just I read about them from my favourite blog. I reached out to the founder and I got the opportunity to work with the organization for for three months.
Use your account to share your passion
I love blogging, and my Instagram is full of pictures and long captions (inspiring people and sharing tips), my Twitter is full of me connecting with other bloggers in the word. You love photography, share what you capture on your account, sell what you make, share your love for things etc. You might gain a following and might as well become an influencer. People pay bills using their social media accounts these days, why not you?
And those are the ways I think we can benefit from these digital platforms.
-Eunice💜
Eunice is a writer at abiblegirl.com, where she shares life tips for millennials. Connect with her on Instagram.
