Marketing analytics is the process of collecting data related to marketing, analyzing the data across sources, and finding valuable insights that play an essential role in optimizing the goals of a business.
Moreover, tools and strategies assist businesses in maximizing their time and budgets. They are also helpful in building better relationships with customers and ultimately growing their revenue. In this blog post, we will look at a comprehensive guide to marketing analytics.
Basics of Marketing Analytics
In this modern era of technology, businesses have extended their technologies so far and support them in building awareness, scheduling follow-ups, launching campaigns, and nurturing leads as well. Marketing analytics allows you to look at big-picture trends by focusing on every minor detail.
With the help of the big picture, marketing analytics helps you to predict which program or campaign worked, failed, or succeeded. It also enables you to check the market trends on and off. No doubt, every marketing campaign forecasts results as well.
Who Uses Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is used by a lot of individuals and organizations belonging to different industries. Here are some of the stakeholders who take advantage of marketing analytics.
- Marketing managers utilize marketing analytics to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, allocate budgets more efficiently, and optimize strategies to achieve marketing goals.
- Data analysts are the stakeholders who are experts in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to offer insights related to marketing decisions.
- Chief marketing officers are the leaders of every marketing department. CMOs are heavenly dependent on marketing analytic techniques in order to keep track of marketing performance, assess the ROI, and make strategic decisions.
- Digital marketers are the professionals who are directly involved in digital marketing tools to keep track of website traffic, monitor social media engagement, and email marketing performance, and handle other digital channels.
- Advertising agencies take the help of marketing analytics to discuss the impact of the efforts related to advertising, refine the strategies related to targeting, and optimize the campaign performance for the clients.
- Market researchers take advantage of analytics in order to analyze consumer behavior, trends, and preferences which helps in organizing effective marketing strategies and product offerings.
- Small business owners and entrepreneurs can utilize marketing analytics to understand their customer base, provide opportunities for career growth, and make decisions related to the investments in carrying out marketing.
- Sales teams also collaborate with all kinds of marketing departments and use analytics in order to understand customer behavior. Moreover, it also helps to prioritize the leads and take their sales approach accordingly.
- Product managers are also dependent on marketing analytics in order to collect feedback related to the products, assess the market demands, and inform about the decisions related to the development of the products.
- Executives across different departments use marketing analytics to collect insights related to the market trends, and competitor analysis and monitor the overall business performance to make informed decisions.
In short, anyone involved in making marketing decisions, whether at a small or significant level, can take advantage of the insights marketing analytics provides.
What Are The Three Critical Elements Of Marketing Analytics Strategy?
Let’s have a look at the three key elements of effective marketing analytics strategy and find out which tools and techniques you need to make it successful.
- Collecting data accurately
- Analyzing data to identify trends and patterns
- Acting on the insights learned from the data.
Now discuss these one by one:
Collecting Data Accurately
The first key element in marketing analytics strategy is to collect accurate data and data must come from a variety of sources such as website traffic data, social media data, and so on. There exists a lot of tools and techniques which you can use to collect this type of data such as web analytics tools, social media monitoring tools, and so on.
Once you have complete data, the next step is to store it in a specific location so it’s easy to access and analyze. With a business intelligence tool, you can connect yourself with all types of business tools that you can use to provide updates in near time.
Analyzing Data To Identify Trends And Patterns
The next step is to analyze the data to figure out current trends and patterns. This plays a vital role in understanding what’s working and what’s not so that you can change your planned strategy accordingly.
Acting On The Insights Learned From The Data
The data you collect is beneficial only if you also have its insights. Once you have analyzed the data and are familiar with its trends and patterns it’s time to take action based on these circumstances. This means that you need to make changes to your marketing analytics strategy revise your sales process or even change your product offerings.
Types of Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics fall into many categories each of which interprets different kinds of data. It’s essential to note that each category of analytics provides valuable insights, but businesses can take most of the benefit by using a guide to marketing analytics. Basically, there are three types of marketing analytics:
- Descriptive marketing analytics
- Predictive marketing analytics
- Prescriptive marketing analytics
Let’s look at these three types of marketing analytics one by one.
Descriptive Marketing Analytics
This type of marketing analytics describes what occurred in the past. Descriptive marketing analytics serve as the foundation by analyzing the historical data performance that is quite easy to understand. Examples include making an annual sales report, the number of forms that are filled on a webpage, and the percentage related to the people who actually clicked on the ad.
It provides marketers with support for establishing data patterns and trends. Often the descriptive answers include “what?” but not the “why?” and “how”?
Predictive Marketing Analytics
As the name suggests, predictive marketing analytics explain what can happen in the future, and this technique is focused on the coming marketing trends. By analyzing the descriptive data, marketers can begin to predict how these trends will go on and their impact on future outcomes.
For example, nowadays many businesses use predictive analysis to suggest new products to existing customers.
Prescriptive Marketing Analytics
Out of all the three types of marketing analytics, prescriptive marketing analytics describes what should happen. This form of analytics uses information learned from descriptive and predictive analysis to make actionable recommendations for the future.
On the other hand, sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and different techniques are used to fuel the prescriptive analysis which helps marketers to optimize the results while lessening the risk associated with humans. For example, a typical example of prescriptive marketing analytics is email automation.
Why Are Marketing Analytics Techniques Important?
In today’s digital world, nowadays shoppers are flooded with marketing messages and tactics everywhere they find out. This has permitted them to become more selective in the media they choose to interact with and ultimately make the purchases they decide to make.
To capture the attention of shoppers and drive sales, it’s essential to have access to robust data and a guide to marketing analytics that allows them to target the right people, on the right channel, at the right time with the right message. It also surfaces this type of information, which plays a crucial role in shaping the most effective and profitable marketing strategies.
Benefits Of Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics is managing, and analyzing data, finding out the ROI of marketing efforts, and identifying potential improvements. It is made possible by tracking business performance data and indicator metrics.
They are critical because they allow businesses to better take care of high-level marketing trends and find out which campaigns succeeded or failed. So you can forecast future results with the help of the right marketing analytic tools.
Let’s have a look at the few benefits of marketing analytics. These are as follows:
- Enables the personalization of the customer journey
- Marketing data integration
- Campaign or strategy optimization
- Improved cohort segmentation
- Attribution modeling
- Awareness analysis
- Customer acquisition cost
Discuss these benefits of marketing analytics one by one.
Enables The Personalization Of The Customer Journey
Each customer has their own journey before they take a decision to purchase a product. Marketing analytics provide you with information about how customers are collaborating with brands, social media, and what they are searching for. Having this sort of information enables you to provide customers with information at every stage of their journey.
Marketing Data Integration
Marketing departments have ultimate efforts and they run simultaneously across teams and platforms. College data from different types of channels can be daunting and needs coordination. The right marketing data analytics tool can be a game changer by centralizing all of your data for analysis.
Campaign or Strategy Optimization
Campaign is an integral part of any marketing strategy and not having data from your campaign is less than ideal and results in wasted time and strategy. Marketers need to extract data from the opportunities and optimize campaign performance.
Improved Cohort Segmentation
Cohort segmentation allows you to break customers into small groups so that different campaigns can be used for better results. As you improve campaigns you will be able to collect high-quality data to better your efforts and your ability to drive business. Consumers respond well to the marketing done in person and with the right data you can have highly effective personalized messaging.
Attribution Modeling
Attribution modeling provides you with the needed information by revealing which pain points in the customer journey were effective. It assigns a score to each pain point on the basis of how influential it was in the journey. This makes it easier for you to figure out and invest in the effective pain points for the future.
Awareness Analysis
Marketing analytics makes you able to look at the key points of your social channels against your competitors giving you insight into how effective brand awareness analysis stands against them. But once you have all the data you can then look at the search volumes, traffic, and what people are saying about your business on social media.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Marketing analytics programs enable you to keep track of the performance of campaigns you run. Its marketing efforts show you which one of the campaigns has a low CPA. With this data, you can compare and contrast how much your average CPA compares to the rest of the industry.
Digital Marketing vs Data Analytics: Which One is Better
Digital marketing and data analytics both are significant in their ways but they work for different purposes.
Digital marketing is like a campaign and strategy that you use in order to promote a brand, business, product, or service. It consists of so many things such as social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, and so on. Basically, it’s about getting the word out and attracting customers with the help of an online presence.
On the other hand, in the guide to marketing analytics, data analytics is simply about gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data to understand how well the marketing efforts of any digital marketers are working. It helps you to be familiar with things such as website traffic, customer behavior, and campaign effectiveness. By looking at the data, you can decide which marketing campaigns you need to focus on, what’s working for you, and what needs improvement.
So the answer to the question “digital marketing vs data analytics which one is better” is not really about which one is better, both work side by side. Digital marketing helps you reach your audience while data analytics helps you understand how they are performing and which things you can improve. Both are essential to build any business’s successful online presence.
Conclusion:
So, in simple words, a guide to marketing analytics is about using special tools in order to understand how well your ads are working. It also assists in knowing things such as what people like, what they clock on, and what they actually buy. By working on this, we can make our ads better and sell more stuff. Marketing analytics tells us what to do in order to be successful while selling a product or service.