Marketing strategies that effectively increase brand awareness, attract more customers, and ultimately boost a company’s revenue don’t come out of nowhere. These strategies are carefully crafted and modified based on a wealth of data marketers have collected and analyzed. That’s why understanding marketing analytics is critical to the success of marketing efforts.
Use this article to learn about the basics of marketing analytics, its stages, benefits, and trends. You’ll also discover popular analytics tools and technologies and how to use analytics to make informed marketing and critical business decisions.
Brief Overview of the Importance of Marketing Analytics
Why is marketing analytics important?
Marketers need to make many decisions when designing and implementing marketing campaigns. It encompasses decisions about the choice of distribution channels, advertising budgets, market segmentation, etc.
Marketing analytics eliminates the guesswork in the decision-making process. It gives marketers data-driven insights they can use to plan campaigns and carry out activities that will help them accomplish their goals. It’s a practice that’s been going around the marketing landscape even before the dawn of the internet. Today, over 80% of marketing professionals use data to make informed marketing decisions.
The Basics of Marketing Analytics
Analytics has applications in a variety of fields, such as finance, information security, and management. In this article, we will delve into what is analytics in marketing.
Definition and Scope
We can define marketing analytics as a practice of tracking, gathering, and analyzing marketing data. The data can come directly from your users or other organizations. Marketers analyze these data to assess the effectiveness and success of their marketing activities.
Key metrics and KPIs
In starting marketing analytics, you need to identify aspects of the marketing campaign to measure. These are called metrics and key performance indicators.
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Overall website traffic
- Exit and bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Social engagement
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Cost per click
Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) is defined as the process of using data to validate a course of action or inform the decision-making process. Simply put, you make decisions based on relevant data instead of relying on your intuition or “gut.”In marketing, you can use data to generate insights for planning and tailoring campaigns.
Leveraging insights for strategic planning
Data analysis will give you insights into your customer’s behavior. You’ll also be able to know what’s working and what isn’t. You can use the wealth of information you gain from analyzing data to plan.
Tailoring campaigns based on analytics
Analyze data to spot emerging trends, customer buying patterns, and customer preferences. Use the information to develop marketing strategies tailored to the expectations and needs of your target audience.
The 4 Stages of Marketing Analytics
To get started with data analytics marketing professionals should understand what they want to measure and establish a benchmark. Setting clear metrics will make it easier to gain the insights you need.
The next step is to find the right talent to extract and process data. Since most marketers usually do not have the necessary skill set to leverage market analytics, there will be a need to hire a data scientist, external consultant, or the like. A study revealed that only less than 2% of companies have people who can skillfully process marketing analytics data.
Once you’ve identified your metrics and employed the right talent, the third step would be deploying a marketing analytics tool. We will discuss a few of your options below to help you get started. Your chosen tool will show you numbers, and it will be up to you to draw conclusions.
How to Optimize Marketing ROI
Marketing return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important metrics you can track. It measures the success and profitability of marketing efforts, allowing companies to determine whether the money they use for marketing generates a profit.
Optimize your marketing ROI through the following strategies:
Identify high-performing channels.
Avoid wasting resources on channels that do not yield desirable results. Experiment with crucial channels, like email and social media, and determine where most leads and conversions come from. Focus your marketing efforts on those high-performing channels.
Allocate the budget effectively.
Effective marketing budget allocation can help ensure every dollar spent contributes to your company’s bottom line. Distribute your budget strategically among different campaigns and channels based on their potential ROI. Consider using real-time bidding or programmatic advertising to optimize your ad spending.
Experiment with different marketing channels
From billboards and social media campaigns to text messaging, marketers have many options at their disposal for reaching new customers. But it won’t be cost-effective to run campaigns on each of these channels. Experimentation will enable you to determine which channels to focus on.
Implement A/B testing across all campaigns.
Create two variations of your campaign and compare their performance to determine which one can help you meet your goals. The more split testing you do, the more you can refine your marketing campaign. So, periodically re-test elements of your campaign and make necessary adjustments.
Focus on your ad spend and income.
It’s crucial to know how much you are spending at each stage of your marketing campaigns if you want to improve ROI. Keeping tabs on your ad spend will help you discover areas that don’t yield good results.
Conduct market research to understand your target audience.
Understanding your target audience is necessary in crafting marketing content that resonates with them. Market research can help you learn more about your prospects, including their wants and preferences.
5 Marketing Analytics Tools and Technologies
Marketers must deal with an immense amount of data. The right tools are necessary to turn the data into a digestible format so you can derive actionable insights. Fortunately, you can now find many solutions designed to help you process data.
So, what are marketing analytics tools and technologies can you use? Here are a few you can integrate into your existing marketing technology stack:
DashThis
Dashthis is a user-friendly, automated marketing reporting tool for creating marketing reports. It integrates with most major platforms, including Facebook, Google Ads, and Google Analytics. With it, you can easily combine marketing metrics in one dashboard for easy data segmentation and analysis.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics collects data from websites, apps, and internet-connected devices. It’s a free analytics platform, making it ideal for small businesses that are just getting started with marketing analytics. You can easily install it on any website and integrate it with other marketing and sales analytics tools.
SEMRush
SEMRush specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, backlink analysis, and content marketing. You can use its analytics functionalities to inform your content marketing strategies and improve your organic search ranking. It integrates with major social media platforms, Google products, and tools like Zapier, WordPress, and Trello.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is part of a suite of HubSpot solutions. The hub features a variety of marketing tools, including a user-friendly reporting functionality and dashboards that present sales and marketing data. It also has comprehensive web analytics tools you can use to collect and report on customer data and web analytics.
Tableau
Tableau is a household name in big data analytics and BI tools. It can do more than analyze marketing activities, making it helpful for enterprise-level companies. In terms of integration, you can find many native connectors for multiple file types and databases.
6 Marketing Analytics Trends
Learning about marketing analytics trends can help your team stay ahead of the curve. Below are a few of the top 2024 trends to expect.
Wider Use of Automation
Marketing automation has now become a necessity rather than a choice. Businesses these days can access vast datasets, and automation can accelerate data processing so marketers can get insights faster. Automation solutions can analyze data as it streams in, allowing marketers to make immediate decisions based on the existing data. Automation also reduces human errors, increasing data accuracy.
Better Focus on Social Media Channels
Social media platforms have a massive audience, with billions of active users who can be your advertising audience. Hence, companies will likely focus more on social media marketing content.
More Usage of First-Party Data
Google is ending third-party cookies, which marketers use to track and personalize ads for consumers, by the end of 2024. It will likely leave companies with no other option but to obtain first-party data. While collecting first-party data may not be as convenient as gathering third-party data, it can help companies understand their customers better.
Better Customer Engagement and Retention
With many options out there, more than 30% of consumers will easily switch brands if they have poor customer experience. The competition is just getting tougher by the day, with new products emerging in the market daily. So, companies will likely invest more in customer retention and engagement efforts.
Reporting of Accurate Real-time Data
Getting real-time analysis allows companies to make informed decisions and adjust their strategy quickly. This ability gives businesses a competitive advantage, so they are more likely to implement real-time data management.
Lead Scoring Models Based on Value
Marketers may soon see changes in how they score and prioritize sales leads. By using value-based scoring to identify the highest-value leads, businesses can more efficiently organize pools of potential customers. AI-powered tools for customer retention and management can help with these processes.
