Software

How Business Intelligence and Automation is Taking Over Marketing

Business Innovation

Since the internet made its transitions into the average household in the 90’s there has been an explosion of websites. Billions and billions of sites clutter the World Wide Web and amongst all this chaos are the millions upon millions of online stores. The noise coming from all retailers competing for attention has become deafening to most, hence the overwhelming popularity of software additions like ad blockers.

If you are one of the many businesses competing in the online sphere, you have to start getting creative and playing smarter if you want any reasonable share of the online market.

Technology is allowing companies, with the foresight to utilize it, to use algorithms and automation to compete better and stand out from the crowd. Sure, marketing automation allows marketers to keep up to date with repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions – but this isn’t the game changing aspect – most automated marketing simply repeats the tasks a human would normally do. While helpful, this can only be so beneficial. The real change has come from predictive algorithms and their insertion into automatic pricing structures as well as clever usage of business intelligence.

Use Data to Stay Competitive

Business intelligence has come farther than ever imagined. Most companies are drowning in analytic data and statistics about their customers, everything from their age and sex to their favorite ice cream and color. There is no shortage of information on your target market.

80% of online businesses forgo using analysis software to compile and make sense of the mountains of data available to them; this is a huge misstep. The companies that eventually survive and prosper in the online market are the ones savvy enough to exploit this data with modern technology successfully. This is where automation and predictive algorithms really shine.

Use Predictive Pricing to Stay Ahead

Dynamic pricing optimization software solution track market trends in real time. These clever pieces of software compile data going back years, in some instances, to predict trends and strategically price your offerings. Implementing dynamic pricing into your e-commerce store allows your products to have competitive prices when demand is low, and to take advantage of the market when demand is high, all with as little effort on your part as possible.

The advanced algorithms used in dynamic pricing have proven themselves in a number of industries, and regularly boost sales by large margins. In addition to predicting overall trends and adjusting accordingly, there are other pricing strategies that your business is encouraged to implement. Dynamic pricing strategies like segmented pricing, peak user pricing, service time and time of purchase.

  • Segmented pricing helps you charge more when dealing with customers likely to pay more. You see this most often in the airline industry charging business people more for midweek flights, for example.
  • Peak user pricing is best demonstrated by ridesharing services like Uber that will charge more on holidays and other high demand times. Prices rise with demand (peak times).
  • Service time pricing refers to a higher charge for faster service. Think about a laundromat that charges 10% more for a one-day service. It’s estimated that many industries could benefit from the smart implementation of service time charges.
  • Time of purchase pricing is a regular feature of airline companies. Depending on the time of day, and its distance from your flight, a ticket can vary considerably in its price. We already mentioned how airlines use segmented pricing as well. They combine the two to generate the most possible profit for each ticket while still filling their flights.

It is near impossible for a single (or even a few) human to keep up on the most effective prices, weighing competitiveness as well as maximizing profit. This is where powerful software kicks in.

Integrate Your Marketing into Your Sales Funnel

The other aspects of marketing automation focus on defining, segmenting, scheduling and eventually tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. Automation is usually used to mark prospective buyers using data gathered from their activities; they are then expected to receive targeted content.

This builds customer loyalty and eventually escorts your audience into the buying phase. Your success rate at every level of this process is evaluated and then adjusted for future campaigns.

Tracking codes, link analysis and other similar means of data acquisition are common tools used to assess the success of content and other marketing channels. There are many pieces of software that can help you with this sales funnel process.

Couple your predictive and dynamic pricing with data based pinpoint messaging and distil all that into your automated sales funnel – and you will have an online shop capable of competing head to head with the big box stores.

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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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