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  Applying Business Intelligence to Marketing and Communications
 
Companies have few options in their quest to understand and measure the return on investment from their marketing and communications programs. What is the impact and strength of their brand? How is their company perceived? Is it positive or negative, and how does this compare to their competitors? Most importantly, what is the impact from their marketing communications spending to their revenue? Will more customers buy their products? In looking for answers today, companies must conduct thorough audits and analyses of their press coverage and their competitors', a time-consuming task that's typically conducted only once per quarter for their company and much less often, if at all, for competitors. Marketers use the results of the analyses, combined with additional ancillary indicators, such as spikes in incoming sales inquiries following a direct marketing campaign or a strong piece of coverage in the Wall Street Journal, to determine whether their strategy is achieving the desired results - or whether adjustments are required.
 
There are numerous problems with this approach, chief among them the fact that the results are inaccurate and not timely. More often than not, it's because marketers can never identify all the relevant information they need - for instance, every piece of print, broadcast and Web coverage for their own company and every competitor they face. That includes every mention of their brand, every comment on their company, and every point on their product. Everything. The task might be easier for start-up companies who get limited coverage- but for huge corporations and visible brands, such as Microsoft, it's practically impossible. Even if they do find everything, they then need to analyze the information and combine the data with any anecdotal evidence they might uncover to draw conclusions.
 
Not only are the results inaccurate, the impact on the marketing and communications departments from a time and resource standpoint is enormous. Companies will need to invest in a product specifically designed to efficiently monitor press coverage, create coverage benchmarks based on standardized metrics, and conduct analysis and measurement to assess the impact of their marketing communications campaigns. They'll then need to delve into additional sources, such as Web sites and e-newsletters. They may even need to conduct part of their information gathering off-line, by reviewing hard-copy editions of certain publications that can't be found online. Even a modest media audit, where a mid-sized company and its competitors are under review, will eat up hours and weeks of time from multiple staffers. And while they're focused on such a project, they're being pulled away from critical activities, such as creating and implementing new programs, and identifying and dealing with issues in the media before they blow out of proportion.
 
New Options Emerge
Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are beginning to solve this problem. Data mining is the most common BI technology today. It helps corporations quickly analyze and make sense of massive amounts of information stored in structured databases throughout the enterprise to identify sales opportunities, supply senior management with data for decision-making, and provide intelligence used in other decision-making processes. Now, new tools and technologies are emerging that bring the value of BI to marketing, branding and corporate communication professionals by tapping into the often overwhelming amounts of unstructured information. By applying the tenets of BI to the marketing function, corporations can automate many of the processes they were previously forced to manually conduct. In addition, it delivers actionable intelligence by giving them immediate access to critical corporate and competitive information as it is uncovered, resulting in more accurate and timely analysis.
 
Perhaps the most important factor in the value of BI solutions specifically designed for the marketing and communications departments is the analysis engine that drives them. There are two approaches to extracting business intelligence from unstructured information:
 
The first uses key word searching. This approach is as simple as it sounds - identifying mentions and coverage of a company and its brand based on key word alone. The limitations of this approach are problematic yet feasible for smaller companies, where their media coverage and that of competitors is easy to identify and analyze and check for accuracy. However, it presents a significant challenge for larger organizations and those who have greater media coverage. The biggest issue is that of false positives - where irrelevant information is pulled. Perhaps you're searching for a company such as General Motors. To find all of the coverage on GM, You need to look for all the ways it is mentioned in the media including General Motors, GM, GMC, and the various auto divisions. Using just keyword searching for GM will elicit thousands of results on GM the company, GM foods (genetically modified foods), and even GMs (general managers) in the news. While extensive search string customizations can be put in place to reduce some of the irrelevant results, a great deal of information can not be easily eliminated, requiring a huge amount of time and effort on the part of the user to identify what's real, and what it all means.
 
The second approach uses natural language processing (NLP). It is one of the most highly accurate methods available, with extremely low numbers of false positives. The best NLP solutions use information extraction technologies that combine statistical and semantic analysis to quickly scan through thousands of unstructured documents to identify those that are truly relevant. In essence the technology deciphers how words within a sentence relate to one another. As such, it can determine whether your company is the focal point of an article, or a passing reference. It can determine what messages are being associated with your brand, and whether your company is being viewed as a technology leader, or behind-the-times. Unlike simple key-word based approaches, NLP technology can be leveraged to automatically discover important information about companies, people, products and competitors, cutting down research and analysis time dramatically and opening up business opportunities that you weren't even looking for.
 
The Business Impact
By choosing the right analysis approach, and by tying that approach into a larger Communications Management strategy in which companies use a single integrated platform to create, execute and measure their marketing and communications programs, companies can take an intelligent approach to measuring brand perception. They can quickly benchmark themselves against their competitors, and can identify who's writing about them and the market, or whether they have more visibility in the trade press versus the business press versus online and broadcast media. They can see which messages are strongly associated with a company, how long certain branding messages maintain visibility and exposure - and which die quickly. They can see, immediately, how a competitor is perceived, and how they're responding to your messages.
 
With the information in hand, companies can make knowledge-based decisions on the fly. For instance, if initial impact on a major product launch is less than expected, immediate action may be required to meet revenue expectations. Or, a company might find, mid-campaign, that its messages aren't sticking, or getting the visibility they need. Again, they might make some adjustments, initiating a quick direct mail drop in combination with issuing a news release over the wire re-stating and re-enforcing the correct messaging. Using traditional approaches, companies would have no idea that their strategies aren't working until months later. But using BI technology, these kinds of on-the-fly strategy changes based on solid data and metrics are possible.
 
Perhaps more importantly, a single integrated Communications Management platform that incorporates NLP technology allows companies to truly justify their marketing and communications expenditures, establish a compelling ROI in months not years, and demonstrate the effectiveness of their strategies, both at a tactical and strategic level. Not only will they be able to explicitly identify how much coverage certain campaigns generated, and how that coverage impacted visibility and brand perception, but they will also be able to better determine the impact on larger strategic goals. In fact, by analyzing the information in comparison to other data points within the company, corporations can correlate how their marketing and communications strategies are impacting sales. It's this capability that is critical to their endeavors, especially in a tight economy where marketing and communications budgets are often the first to get slashed. Finally, marketers can demonstrate the immediate value of their efforts on the corporation's overall success.