What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is the practice of helping marketing departments improve their marketing campaigns and better understand their customers. It can help departments understand what marketing channels are most effective, what most popular content is, and how to target their customers better.
It involves capturing data about customer behaviour, segmenting that data, and then applying statistical analysis to understand what the information means. Businesses can make informed decisions about allocating their marketing resources for maximum impact with this understanding.
Common problems that Marketing Analytics can solve
The following are some common examples:
1. Campaign Effectiveness
What is the return on investment (ROI) for different marketing campaigns? How do they compare to one another? Are any campaigns underperforming?
2. Product Mix and Pricing
Do we have the right mix of products? Are any products overpriced or underpriced?
3. Website Usability
How easy is it to find what you’re looking for on our website? How does our website compare to our competitors’? Is it easy to make a purchase?
4. Customer Acquisition Costs
What are our customer acquisition costs (CAC)? Are they worth the investment? Where can we reduce expenses or increase ROI to improve overall profitability?
The Importance of Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics are essential because they help businesses track the success or failure of their marketing campaigns. Companies can adjust their strategies to improve results by monitoring movements and outcomes. Additionally, marketing analytics enables businesses to make more informed decisions about allocating their marketing resources. If something costs more than it generates, it’s not a good business strategy – and marketing analytics can help prevent that from happening.
Keywords
Keywords are another important metric that can be used to inform business decisions. They tell us what people are thinking, both on the web and off. The most important long-term benefit of engaging in paid and natural search marketing isn’t traffic but keyword data contained within each click which can be used to inform other business processes. For example, if you know that a particular keyword is associated with a high conversion rate, you might want to focus your efforts on that keyword to increase sales.
Industry Trends
Industry trends can also help clarify which keywords will increase and decline more than others, allowing you to predict hot topics of interest to users and where customer support resources need to be deployed when necessary. Overall, marketing analytics provide valuable insights into how customers interact with a business’s products or services – insights that can help businesses achieve long-term success.
Know more about how to improve your marketing game. Read more articles about Marketing Automation here.
How organisations use Marketing Analytics and insights
Marketing analytics are used by organisations to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and to make data-driven decisions about where to allocate their marketing resources. Marketing analytics can measure a wide variety of metrics, including website traffic, conversion rates, and open email rates.
There are a variety of different ways that organisations use marketing analytics. The data gathered from these analytics can help businesses make important decisions about how to market their products and services. It’s important to use both offline and online sources of data so that the organisation has a complete picture of its customers and potential customers.
If you want to have a platform that helps you with marketing problems, check on HubSpot Marketing Hub Services by UDS. For sure, you will find the answers to your needs.
Marketing Analytics Factors
1. Product intelligence
It has been described as “the application of big data analytical techniques to product-related issues to improve decision making, optimise marketing performance, and guide new product development”.
Whereas market research provides information that can be used to make informed strategic decisions about things like what products to develop or how much money to invest in marketing, product intelligence focuses specifically on the use of data to inform decisions about individual products.
2. Customer trends and preferences
This understanding can help them improve how they interact with their customers, what products and services to offer, how to price them, and where to focus marketing efforts.
3. Product development trends and metrics
There have been a few key trends in the product development space that businesses should be aware of in recent years. Let’s take a look at some of these trends:
- If you’re not already using an agile methodology, it’s something to consider.
- If your business isn’t using DevOps yet, it’s worth exploring this approach.
- Ensure you have the right tools to collect and analyse data effectively.
- Businesses need to keep this in mind when developing new products.
4. Customer support
Businesses can ensure that their customers are happy and satisfied with their products or services by providing customer support. Customer support also helps build customer loyalty, which can lead to increased sales and profits for the business.
Some businesses offer customer support through phone calls, while others provide it through online chat or email. Many businesses also have social media accounts where customers can go for help.
Marketing analytics allows businesses to track their customers’ website visits, interactions, and purchases. This data can then be used to create targeted customer support campaigns that are specifically designed to meet the needs of individual customers. Using marketing analytics for customer support makes it easier for businesses to track what their customers are doing and how they are interacting with the business’s products or services.
5. Messaging and media
Messaging communicates an organisation’s strategic vision and goals to customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders. Media are the channels used to deliver messages, including advertising, public relations, digital media and direct marketing.
It can indicate how well a particular message or media mix resonates with customers or stakeholders, identify which channels are most effective in reaching specific audiences and measure the return on investment (ROI) for different campaigns. Organisations can use these insights to optimise their messaging and media mix for better results.
6. Competition analysis
Many organisations use marketing analytics to gain insights that they can use to improve their marketing efforts and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
They can also help businesses identify new opportunities and understand what customers want. Organisations can create targeted marketing campaigns that appeal to specific audiences by understanding customer behaviour.
Marketing analytics give businesses the information to make informed decisions about their marketing strategy, which helps them stand out from the competition.
7. Predict future results
Predictive analytics aims to use past data to make predictions about future events. Predictive analytics involves applying mathematical and statistical models to historical data to identify patterns and trends. These models can then predict the likelihood of specific outcomes occurring in the future.
Some organisations use it to identify which customers are most likely to defect so that they can take steps to prevent this from happening. Others use it to determine which products are most likely to succeed in focusing their marketing efforts on those products. Predictive analytics can also be used to identify potential security threats so that measures can be taken to mitigate these threats before they cause damage.
Key ingredients of Marketing Analytics
There are five essential ingredients to a successful marketing analytics program: culture, skills, team structure, data, and technology. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Culture
First, culture is key. The culture of your company should embrace data and analytics. This means that everyone in the company should be on board with using data to make decisions and that data should be used as a tool to improve performance.
It can help you answer questions such as:
a. What are customers’ needs and wants?
b. How does my marketing compare to that of my competitors?
c. What campaigns are most effective in acquiring new customers?
Marketing teams should be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty and be able to test hypotheses about what works and what doesn’t rapidly. They also need access to the right data (including first-party data), tools, expertise, and support from senior leaders.
2. Skills
Second, you need the right skills to use marketing analytics effectively. This includes both technical skills and analytical skills. You need to be able to collect data, analyse it, and use it to make decisions about your marketing campaigns.
3. Structure
Third, you need the right team structure to use marketing analytics effectively. Your team should be structured so that everyone has the necessary skills and knowledge to use data effectively.
The most common structure for analytics reports is to organise findings by type of analysis: marketing mix, customer, product, etc. This allows readers to quickly scan the report for the information they need and understand how it relates to their business.
4. Data
Fourth, you need access to good quality data to make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns. It is the foundation upon which all insights and actions are taken. Data must be accurate, timely, and actionable to provide value to an organisation.
This process is known as data wrangling. Once data is cleansed, it can be used to answer important business questions such as:
a. How does our target market currently interact with our brand?
b. What are the most effective channels for acquiring new customers?
c. Where should we allocate our marketing budget?
d. Which campaigns are driving the most revenue?
5. Technology
And finally, you need the right technology to collect and analyse data effectively. With the right culture, skills, team structure, data, and technology in place, you can create a successful marketing analytics program that will help your business achieve its goals.
In business, it refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to create and disseminate value. ICT comprises computer hardware, software, telecommunications and related services.
Marketing analytics uses a variety of data sources, including surveys, focus groups, interviews, web analytics, social media data, purchase transaction data and market research reports. The technology used to gather and analyse this data must be able to handle big data volumes quickly and effectively. It must also be able to identify relationships among different data types to uncover insight.
The Marketing Analytics process
Collecting data is the first step in any marketing analytics process, and it’s important to begin by defining your goal. What do you want to learn from your data? Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can start looking for ways to collect the information you need.
It’s also important to assemble a team of people who can work closely together to develop a plan for moving forward with marketing analytics. This team should include representatives from all areas of your business–marketing, sales, product, finance, etc.
Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to start implementing tools that can help make the process run more smoothly. There are many different options available, so find the ones that fit best with your specific needs and goals.
Finally, once all your data is collected, it’s time to analyse it carefully with the goal of creating an accurate predictive model. This will allow you to learn more about what works and what doesn’t to meet future goals.
Step 1: Formulate a reasonable research question.
This involves understanding the business problem that needs to be solved or the opportunity to be pursued. The research question should be specific, actionable and measurable. It’s also essential to make sure that the data needed to answer the question is available and accessible.
This can be done in a number of ways, including using software programs or online tools, conducting surveys or focus groups, or reviewing internal records. Once the data has been collected and analysed, it’s time to draw conclusions and make recommendations based on the findings.
Step 2: Gather all the data you need to answer the question
This can be a daunting task, but it’s important to have all of the relevant data to make accurate decisions. You may need to reach out to different teams within your company or even outside of your company for help gathering the data.
For example, if you’re studying how weather affects sales, you would want to include information on temperature and precipitation levels from as many cities as possible to get a representative sample.
Otherwise, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and won’t be able to draw any useful conclusions.
Step 3: Analyze the data
This means examining the data to see what it tells you about your customers and your marketing efforts. There are various ways to do this, some more complex than others. The most important thing is to use the right analysis for the question you’re trying to answer.
Segmentation divides your customer base into groups based on common characteristics, such as age, gender or location. This helps you understand how different groups respond to your marketing efforts. Another common way to analyse data is through cohort analysis. Cohort analysis looks at how different groups of customers behave over time. For example, you can track how long it takes new customers to make their first purchase or how often they come back to your site.
How to use Digital Marketing Analytics effectively
Digital marketing analytics can be extremely valuable in understanding how your marketing efforts perform. However, many marketers struggle to use these tools effectively. The two main reasons for this are a lack of goals and means to measure success. Without specific goals, it is difficult to determine whether or not a campaign was successful. And without measurable metrics, it is hard to tell whether or not you are making progress toward your goals.
Marketing analytics can determine which channels are most critical for driving sales. There are three basic steps to using digital marketing analytics:
- Setting goals
- Understanding what channels your efforts derive from
- Tracking people-centric data.
Goals can be set in terms of revenue, cost per acquisition, or other metrics best determined by the specific business at hand. The key is to use these tools and not just blindly follow them without thinking about how they will make you money (or save you money).
How is marketing data analyzed?
The first step in marketing data analysis is aggregating and structuring the data. This can be done in various ways, depending on the platform used for analysis. After the data is aggregated, several key insights can be pulled out, and regressions run. However, it’s important to remember that data scientists spend most of their time formatting and wrangling data rather than analysing it.
One of the biggest challenges marketers faces when performing analytics is that they can obtain so much information. This means that analysts have to spend more time cleaning and organising the data, but it also creates problems with data quality. Without good quality data, employees can’t make the right decisions about where to allocate resources within their organisation.
Media mix modelling and multi-touch attribution offer different insights into how customers interact with a company’s marketing campaigns. By understanding these interactions, businesses can make better decisions about where to invest their marketing dollars. To get these types of insights, however, organisations need to maintain high-quality data so employees can use it effectively.
One way of ensuring that marketing data is of high quality is by unifying marketing measurement platforms. This process organises data from disparate sources so it can be easily analyzed. Businesses can overcome the challenge of data quantity and make better decisions about their marketing campaigns. However, to unify these platforms, the data must be first normalised so that it is comparable when analysing campaigns.
Why is Marketing Analytics important?
Marketing analytics is important because it gives marketing managers the information to make better decisions. Without marketing analytics, marketing departments would rely on guesswork or anecdotal evidence for their decision-making process and would have a reduced ability to reach their strategic goals.
Marketing analytics is important because using data helps marketers plan successful campaigns and carry out activities that will help them reach their strategic goals. Marketing departments can use this data to understand customer preferences and determine which customers are most likely to buy from them based on demographic factors, psychographic features such as personality type, purchasing habits, lifestyle interests, etc., to optimise sales efforts for different groups of customers.
1. Improve the user experience
Analytics can help identify where users are dropping off in their journey, what features they are using the most, and how to target ads and content better. Marketing analytics can also help track conversions and ROI for marketing campaigns.
2. Calculate the return on investment of marketing efforts
Marketing analytics involves gathering and analysing data about customers, campaigns, channels and other aspects of marketing to make better decisions about where to allocate resources for the greatest impact.
3. Plan future marketing strategies
By having regular check-ups on where they are and their goals, companies can ensure that they’re always heading in the right direction with their marketing campaigns. Without such planning, it’s easy for businesses to lose focus and not realise when they’re veering off track.
By analysing past data and trends, businesses can better understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to their marketing campaigns. This information can then be used to help plan future strategies – whether that means continuing with what has been successful in the past or trying something new altogether.
Benefits of Marketing Analytics
There are many benefits to using marketing analytics. Perhaps the most obvious is that it can help make advertising more effective by providing a comprehensive view across all channels. This allows businesses to see where they are having the most success and allocate their resources accordingly.
Marketing analytics tools also help generate more sales and ROI. They give businesses insight into customer behaviour and preferences so businesses can tailor their marketing initiatives to meet the needs of individual consumers. In addition, marketing analytics enables real-time decision support and proactive management.
Finally, modern analytics tools make it easy for stakeholders to analyse data as it comes in and offers predictive analytics to anticipate those trends rather than react to them. This allows companies to stay ahead of the competition and maintain a strong market position.
Challenges of Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics is all the rage these days. Every business wants to hop on the data bandwagon and use it to improve its marketing efforts. However, implementing a successful marketing analytics initiative can be difficult for a few reasons.
The first challenge is that marketing data is often siloed within different parts of an organisation, making it difficult for analysts to understand customer behaviour. Analysts need access to data from all marketing channels to make effective decisions, which can be centralised and integrated with a data warehouse.
Another challenge is that gaining management buy-in for marketing analytics initiatives can be tough, especially among executives and marketing decision-makers who may be hesitant to change their ways. Businesses must evaluate existing obstacles and make hires or pitches necessary to overcome them.
Finally, businesses need to select the right KPIs (key performance indicators) that are granular and focused at the same time. Selecting the wrong KPIs can lead to misguided decisions and wasted resources.
To avoid the pitfalls of marketing analytics, enterprises should link their performance measurements directly to concrete business goals. And lastly, but most importantly, businesses must establish data governance and data security policies to protect customers’ sensitive information.
Using Marketing Analytics for your business
You can track how well your marketing campaigns perform and course-correct as needed by analysing metrics and analytics. This information also provides a valuable roadmap for improving efficiency and predicting future returns. In other words, good marketing analytics can help you make a case for marketing investments across the entire organisation.
Suppose you have a hard time understanding all your marketing analytics for your business. In that case, we recommend you partner with Ubique Digital Solutions – a Diamond HubSpot Partner that offers digital marketing services for small and big companies. UDS can help you analyse the data and suggest good strategies and plans for your business.
