Forecasting and Predictive Analysis: You can develop an historical view of your business and create predictive analysis to identify trends and patterns and get ahead of the curve with targeted ads, polls, forums and other tools. Not only will you attract your target audience, but through user interaction with your games and other social media tools, you will learn even more about them and better plan for new products, services and pricing strategies.
What If Sensitivity Analysis: Personalized BI dashboards allow your business users to view integrated data from multiple sources, analyze options and drive social media marketing decisions with accurate information. You can consider competitive response and take swift action to counter your competition, and you can develop effective product and service plans to accurately predict sales and revenue targets, and understand the impact of pricing or other changes on the profit margin and bottom line.
Data Extraction, Transformation and Cube Management: To get the most out of business information you need to easily manage data from numerous sources and analyze it quickly and concisely. Using BI tools that enable web-based configuration you can create and maintain ‘cubes’ of data from multiple sources, in a self-serve, integrated environment, and extract data for reporting, sharing and decision support.
There are challenges to deciding on an internet marketing direction and developing metrics that will accurately predict and measure results, but those challenges are far outweighed by the benefits of marketing and selling in the social media environment. A business can no longer look only to its internal CRM and ERP systems to tell the whole story. Social media interaction is rapid and widespread. The enterprise must now connect internally managed data with information contained in social media APIs, images, posts and conversations, and other external sources. The business must analyze that data using tools to drill down, drill through and across data, and deep dive technology to spot trends and drive business decisions with objective metrics and tools.
To measure and manage social media initiatives, the business requires tools that can be distributed across the marketing team and other stakeholders and leveraged by the average user. These tools must integrate multiple threads and data sources, and process a large volume of information at the summary and detail level. With this level of sophistication and ease of use, a business can discover trends and patterns, create the perfect internet marketing campaign and measure and monitor results to make appropriate changes over time.
