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Business Intelligence vs. Big Data Marketing

Big data marketing is the hottest business buzzword and only getting bigger. It’s often been referred to as the successor of business intelligence, but is this really the case? It's helpful to understand how business intelligence and big data marketing compare to one another, as well as how they offer unique insights for your company.

Data

Big data and business intelligence are both incredibly important for making decisions, but there’s a huge difference between the information collected. Business intelligence is a technology-driven process for analyzing data that presents actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers, and others make more informed decisions. Big data is very similar. It collects information that helps the company make informed decisions, but on a much larger scale. Rather than just focusing on the business itself, big data can even analyze behaviors of customers and trends within the industry to produce improved marketing.

Goals

The goal of business intelligence is to produce performance indicators to understand the past. It can also help analyze the present to comprehend data and make long-term business changes that improve the company. Business intelligence is used by many companies to support operational activities by monitoring any incoming data. Big data's goal is to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences, and other useful information that can help companies make informed business decisions.  While it's very similar, big data doesn’t automatically lead to better marketing like business intelligence. Big data is just the raw material and requires a big data analysist to sort through the minutiae of information.

Marketing

The goal of market research is to improve business decisions, which correlates to business intelligence and big data marketing. Both of these tools can improve marketing techniques, though in different ways. Business intelligence marketing can help identify and focus on high-profit customers. It can also increase the accuracy of sales forecasts by using insights from seasonal demand, product promotions, slow-moving items, and much more. Finally, business intelligence can also help measure the effect of marketing programs. As mentioned before, big data doesn’t always lead to better marketing, but there’s a large amount of potential. Big data marketing can improve customer engagement by showing who customers are, where they live, what they are in-market for, and their preferred contact method. Additionally, it can help a business retain customers and increase loyalty by discovering what influences them. Finally, big data can optimize marketing and performance as a business continuously analyzes programs.

Cost

It’s obvious that both big data marketing and business intelligence can improve your business, but which is cheaper? Unfortunately, both are quite expensive. Datamartist estimates the cost of business intelligence to be $150,000 for just the software. This doesn’t account for the amount of time spent analyzing the information to produce results. Unfortunately, big data can be much more difficult. Some of the programs require quite a bit of RAM, which may necessitate a hardware upgrade to run the software required. Additionally, it may require extra training to learn the programs and data processing. Potentially, big data marketing can become much more expensive.

Last Updated: November 19, 2021