What You Need to Know About Business IntelligenceWritten by David McKeegin
Every business wants to be successful. That success always comes from growth. With most businesses, growth comes from customer retention and gaining new customers. “Business Intelligence” can help a company gain new customers and retain old customers. Business intelligence can be abbreviated BI. A formal definition of business intelligence is that it is a process of collecting information in area of business. In BI, data collected is enhanced into information and then into knowledge. Business Intelligence can give any business an accurate idea of its customers’ needs. Businesses that have large amounts of information about their customers can act upon that information. Businesses utilizing BI gain knowledge and understanding of a customer’s needs, customer’s decision-making process, and economic, cultural, and technological trends. When using businesses intelligence, businesses select either short term or long goals. BI helps a company reach those goals.Business Intelligence History The idea of business intelligence goes back to Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” Tzu believed that in order to win a war, you must have complete knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as strengths and weaknesses of your enemy. This is central idea in present-day business intelligence. Companies must know themselves better than their competitors, and they must know their competitors better. War and business are a lot alike considering that with BI, one must sift through heaps of data (both external and internal) for management to then make strategies for where to take business and marketing. Warfare involves strategic plans as well. BI is process of gaining information about every element of your market. Simply understanding customer is not enough; a business must understand its competitors, and itself. KPI, Key Performance Indicators The present state of business is assed by use of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in business intelligence. As more companies implement KPI, data is becoming available to business faster and more efficiently. Data used to be available for business only after one or two months. This untimely availability did not help business adjust their strategies. More recently, banks have tried to make data available sooner and with shorter intervals. Banks do this especially for businesses that have higher credit/operational risk loading. This allows many companies to get new data weekly, and adjust their strategies faster than ever before, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
| | Marketing One We Site With Perpetual MarketingWritten by Dean Shainin
I describe perpetual marketing as a large number of people promoting one web site so they can all receive traffic generated by each other. For example, you decide to create a free ebook that you will give away to your web site visitors. You ask a large number of e-zine owners to give away ebook in exchange for their ad in ebook. You can just ask them to link directly to your web site when they promote ebook for marketing. You, of course, will have one of your own ads on that web page that you will also be marketing. Let's say you get 8 out of 20 e-zine owners that agree to giveaway ebook you are marketing. The 8 e-zines total subscriber base is 75,000. Now, you can ask more e-zine owners if they would like to promote ebook in exchange for an ad inside ebook. This time you can say, you already have 8 e-zines already promoting ebook with a subscriber base of 75,000. The next group of e-zine owners you ask will be more tempted to promote your ebook because there is a greater chance they will receive a lot of traffic from deal. It's win/win situation!
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