In the world of digital marketing, analytics help us understand critical marketing impact on sales and predict marketing trends, user behavior and optimizing the user experience (UX) to drive sales. Marketing analytics is the key to analyzing past performance of an organization and determining how it can improve in the long run. But, we need to learn the basics of analytics before going deeper into the topic.
What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics helps you evaluate the effectiveness and success of your marketing activities. You can optimize your marketing objectives, fetch deeper consumer insights, and get a better return on investment by integrating marketing AI into your business strategy.
Analytics brings statistics, machine learning, and predictive modeling to reveal insights and answer questions. The goal of marketing analytics is to maximize ROI and help you make informed decisions.
Marketers use these analytics to establish business metrics and create new KPIs that help them measure the success of their organizations’ marketing initiatives.
These metrics include:
- Customer lifetime value
- Profitability segmented by demographic
- Churn rate
- Public perception
- Customer satisfaction
Here we want to point out two main purposes of marketing analytics:
- Status: To measure how well your marketing efforts are performing.
- Actions: Determining what you can do differently to get better results across your marketing channels.
Businesses can also analyze different performance indicators like demographics, purchasing patterns, or customer profiles to reveal the causal links between marketing decisions and actual sales.
Why does marketing analytics matter?
Marketing analytics helps clients achieve a comprehensive view of all the marketing channels you invested in, such as email marketing, PPC advertising, and social media. Analytics can clarify the big picture, and specify more granular marketing trends.
It’s an excellent method to recognize your customer journey and discover what’s working for your campaigns and what isn’t. And having that data is vital to your future online marketing strategy.
Let’s discuss how you can leverage marketing analytics:
Quantifiable achievements
Numbers are persuasive. Your CFO will be impressed if you could tell them that 68 percent of your consumers make a purchase after reading a specific landing page.
Marketing analytics provides insights into your customer behavior and preferences in your business. Businesses can then identify the loopholes and tailor their marketing initiatives to meet the needs of their customers.
Marketing analytics lets you measure marketing impact by seeing the data before and after a campaign. With marketing analytics, you can determine which marketing efforts are working in your favor and which strategies need improvement.
Turn data into information
Marketing analytics helps stakeholders achieve a comprehensive view across all marketing channels, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media, email marketing, etc.
Analytics can show you the big picture, as well as dig down into further granular marketing trends.
Compare and contrast your marketing data
Marketing analytics tools improve and modify lead generation by helping to optimize advertising efforts and target the most profitable consumers.
Marketing analytics provides real-time customer insights and preferences. Businesses can also tailor their marketing efforts to meet the requirements of individual consumers.
Stay goal-oriented
Modern analytics tools help stakeholders to analyze data as it comes in, so marketing strategies can be formulated as needed by changing trends. They also allow organizations to use predictive analytics and predict those trends rather than react to them.
What are the Three Main Components of Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is any kind of marketing data that aims to help out in a company’s marketing efforts. It can include web analytics, social media analytics, and much more.
But, here are going to discuss three primary types of marketing analytics:
- Descriptive analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
These three types of analytics can help you decide your marketing strategy. All three involve collecting and analyzing data to boost your marketing efforts. But each of the three accomplishes something very different.
Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics uses data to explain what happened in the past. This information can help marketers understand past marketing performance of an organization and give an environment for a better understanding of what’s happening in the market presently.
Suppose, you are trying to understand how a blog post performed in the last 30 days. As a content manager or SEO specialist, you’ll need to run a quick descriptive analysis of the blog and track metrics like page views, impressions, clicks etc. to understand how it performed. Afterwards, you can compare the data you see to the first 30 days performance of similar blog posts you’ve published in the past.
You can also look at the sources for these posts to discover differences that might explain the differing performance. Maybe your latest post, for example, has gone viral on social media or is being bolstered by views from a paid campaign.
Descriptive analytics, therefore, provides a way for you to answer the important questions, what happened, and why?,( individual analytics does too. It’s a subcategory of descriptive analytics, that’s concentrated on using data to diagnose problems, explain disagreement, etc.) Although the primary goal of descriptive analytics isn’t to predict future events, it can nonetheless be useful for validation, particularly in industries with regular cyclical patterns.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is a type of data science that uses data to make predictions about future outcomes. This generally involves large volumes of data and a machine learning algorithm that can use that data to make increasingly accurate predictions over time.
For example, a machine learning algorithm may find “clusters” in your marketing followers and be suitable to predict the most profitable parts to target based on demographics, interests, and other factors.
While this is a process that can also be done manually, a machine learning algorithm can work with many advanced volumes of marketing data, and it can reiterate much more briskly. This enables it to find complex audience segments that a human being would have missed.
Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics focuses on using marketing data to recommend the most important actions you can do. It’s frequently used in tandem with marketing automation to ensure that its recommendations can be carried out immediately.
For instance, let’s say your predictive analytics work suggests that your point will probably get an influx of new callers. How can you take advantage of that? Prescriptive analytics can help you pick the best products, deals, and messaging to punctuate for maximum profits.
How to Plan and Implement Marketing Analytics In Your Organization
When you have strategic marketing analytics in place, you will know which data points you should monitor and which needs to be eliminated for your ROI. Here we will discuss how you can implement marketing analytics in your organization.
Understand Search Marketing
Search marketing is a digital marketing strategy that encompasses search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
Search marketing uses paid and unpaid techniques to increase your business visibility across the internet.
For example, visualize the last time you searched for something on the internet. The “search query” shows you a page similar to what you were searching for. This page is known as the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When you rank higher on the SERPs, your chances of website traffic increase. But, how does Google determine which search results to show or who gets the top placements?
This is where search marketing comes for your help.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Organic Search Marketing
SEO is the process where you can grow your web presence via unpaid efforts. When you put any search query, you can see the unpaid links that appear in the search engine results, generally below the paid search ads.
Search engines like Google find your content by crawling the internet and reviewing the text, pdf, documents, and other content on your website. Google also considers the data in your website’s source code, also known as meta tags, site speed, and how many other sites are linking directly to your website, and provides the readers with the best possible search.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or Paid Search Marketing
If you have the budget, then paid search marketing can give you a better result than organic efforts, and a higher level of control over where you want to place your content in the search results.
With paid search, you can inform Google the exact search term they want their ads to show for. When the viewer clicks on one of your paid search ads, you have to pay a set cost to the search engine (called pay per click). The price you pay is called your cost per click (CPC).
Analyze Social Media Engagement
Further a third of the world’s population — including 98% of digital consumers — spend time on social media. It comprises nearly two and a half hours per day on these platforms. While SEM drives deals from users who are searching for specific products, social media marketing can induce interest and demand from new groups of consumers.
Social media is one of the most popular marketing channels for numerous businesses and organizations, similar to craft merchandisers on Pinterest, fashion brands on Instagram, and nonprofits on Facebook. Numerous social media platforms offer their analytics tools, similar to Facebook Analytics or Twitter Analytics, and third-party options are available as well.
Analyzing data obtained through social media platforms can allow you to analyze client behavior and nurture client connections. For instance, marketers can set up an account to automatically post information about new products or features as they come out, use an analytics tool to estimate consumer sentiment through responses without manually going through the data, and also rework their social media marketing as necessary.
For example, on Twitter, you can go to Twitter Analytics and visit the Tweets tab to see the number of tweet impressions. Look for sudden spikes in impressions on particular days, and check what caused them.
Optimize Email Marketing
Though businesses can use Email marketing to reach a new audience, Email marketing is more frequently concerned with users who have opted into mailing lists or have formerly bought products and services. Email provides a more direct hand of consumer sentiment than other channels because consumers are more likely to respond to directly addressed mails, or interact with advertised material. Popular Email marketing tools include – Mailchimp, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Marketo.
Organizations can use analytics to optimize their Email marketing campaign. Analyzing how your customers interact with different Email marketing efforts can help businesses target their Email marketing and make changes as necessary to attract their attention and make them follow the desired action. Enterprises can use marketing analytics to determine, for example, whether consumers respond well to certain keywords, Emails transferred at particular times of day, or links to content on specific topics.
Take Advantage of Predictive Scoring
Predictive lead scoring models influence marketing data from all channels, as well as internal data, to produce a full picture of client behavior, advertising efforts, and marketing tactics. Campaigns can also target individual consumers to maximize effectiveness. For example, a predictive scoring system could rank individualities by the liability of retention and threat of churning, which could help prioritize outreach to an organization’s customer base.
Marketing Analytics Examples
As marketing analytics evolved into a must-have for any organization, you should start looking for ways to use the data to set your brand apart and give value to your audience.
Here are five examples to help you get creative and inspire your team.
Spotify and Its Unique Brand Strategy
Spotify’s Wrapped point has been creating a social buzz in December since 2016.
In a nutshell, the point gives you a shot at your listening habits. This is an illustration of how to use marketing analytics to harness data, give value to consumers, induce content, and encourage product operation.
Unlike numerous other companies, Spotify is using the Wrapped strategy to give value to users in exchange for the data. In effect, they’re imaging consumer data in an accessible and intriguing way.
Source
Music is frequently a big part of a person’s identity, and Spotify gives an opportunity for users to express that through data by participating in it and using it to socially engage with their musketeers.
Sephora’s Digital Experience
Along with being one of the world’s largest beauty retailers, Sephora shines with its substantiated digital experience, too.
Source
By exercising data similar to past purchases and browsing history, the company is successfully creating memorable, personalized experiences for their customers. Then, Sephora is enforcing effects similar to customized prices, recommended products on the homepage, and a ‘new for you’ tab.
Keeping the Content Engaging: Netflix
Netflix has a brilliant user interface, and a great example of how marketing analytics can help keep content engaging. The company continuously collects data and uses data analytics to uncover and analyze customer behavior patterns. You will be amazed to see their personalized recommendation, engaging content based on the subscriber’s searching and watching habits.
Key Takeaways
Marketing analytics isn’t a one-and-done process. It’s a commitment and a constant process in your digital marketing strategy.
To check if your attention is going to the right places, flashback some of the tried-and-true analytics best practices
Specify your goals – having clear goals will help you pick the applicable information and guide your opinions
Gather high-quality data – applicable, current, and comprehensive data is crucial for having great analytics.
Filter the right information – segmenting your customer data grounded on points that can impact your results (e.g. age, educational position, periodic income) allows you to filter your data and take what you need.
Are you feeling inspired to explore other ways to apply your data-driven marketing strategy? Book a Growth Nirvana free demo today, and learn more about how marketing analytics can help you grow your business.
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- How to Leverage Email Marketing with Advanced Analytics?
- The Best 7 Domo Alternatives in 2023
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Related Guide Resources:
- 101 Guide to Quantitative Data Analysis [Methods + Techniques]
- Connect Google Analytics with Google Data Studio: 101 [New Guide]
- An Ultimate Guide To Omnichannel Analytics: Meaning, Benefits, Setup Process
- An Ultimate Guide To Omnichannel Analytics: Meaning, Benefits, Setup Process
- What is Marketing Analytics? Examples and Its Importance
