There's nothing more frustrating than having collected a bunch of data that you can't apply. There are lots of reasons for not being able to apply it. Maybe you don't have the tools that allow you to do anything with the data. Maybe you are just unsure of the best actions you could take to leverage the data. Or maybe like most people, you just don't have time to deal with it! This would be a great application of the adage: Ain't nobody got time fo' dat!
You might glance at your Google Analytics reports every now and then, but it would really take you a week to fully dig into it and look at trends and figure out how you adjust your site in response. Or maybe you collect emails on your site, but aside from occasionally sending out a quarterly newsletter, you're not really sure if or how you should leverage that information.
Intelligence in our context is all about making real-time logic-based decisions based on the information available about the environmental variables that exist. And it doesn't have to be as complicated as some Sci Fi movies tend to make you believe. At its core, intelligence simply allows us to ingest a bunch of information, and to determine how to appropriately respond. Amazon has intelligence. Ever wonder how it's able to recommend a few books or movies, out of a universe of millions, that are pretty close to what you'd enjoy? It's crunching a ton of data about you and people similar to you, and determines, based on a set of logic and precision, how to respond.
It's not so far-fetched to think that our websites could incorporate intelligence. There's lots of information we could collect and gather about visitors and other visitors like them. If the website were able to crunch all that data, with a set of logic instructions, it could determine how to respond with relevant and interesting content that suits them. It's like if you were having a conversation, and someone told you they hated talking about politics, you'd probably be well off not talking about the latest breaking political frenzy on cable news. Okay, a bit rudimentary, but the point is simple: our sites could leverage data to determine what to present to a web visitor. That's intelligence.
There are lots of great benefits from using intelligence:
If you feed the site more and more interesting data, it has more options from which it can choose. A highly dynamic site should be based primarily on the visitor. That's the target, and that's where intelligence is most effectively applied.
Once set up, that website continues using intelligence over and over again, without your involvement. It's a residual relationship builder!
The most important benefit, though, is that web visitors get a personalized experience based on the relationship you're establishing with them.
If that sounds reasonable, the main question now is how can you put intelligence to use? We simply need a tool that can manage the data, the logic, and the actions. And in case you're wondering, yep, we've got that!