Everything in life happens through a process. Whether it’s in our daily individual activities or our business efforts, there is usually a well-established way to go about any responsibility.
But processes, for all the good they bring to our lives and business, can go wrong sometimes and not achieve their intention. When processes do not deliver the intended result, a proper analysis of the process is needed to get things back on track.
What is Marketing Analytics?
As an entrepreneur, manager, or digital marketer, you must continually measure and study the cornerstone metrics of your marketing initiatives. This exercise is very often the difference between business success and bankruptcy. And this is what marketing analytics is all about.
Marketing analytics is a critical assessment of the data gathered from your marketing efforts and those of your competitors and your industry in general. It helps to identify the relationships between your campaign efforts and your geographic and creative preferences, conversion rate, consumer behavior, and a lot more. The idea is to utilize these findings to arrest your campaign’s decline and to optimize it and future campaigns.
Why should you conduct a marketing analysis consistently?
Because market and consumer behavior, sentiment, and conditions change all the time, there is no such thing as a one-and-done marketing campaign. As time passes, new technologies emerge, and customer needs evolve, you should be ready to tweak your campaign accordingly.
Consistent marketing analysis will help you deliver more targeted and timely ads to your customers based on individual interests rather than interests associated with a broader demographic. It is like a writing company soliciting reviews on general business review sites like Yelp or Trustpilot, instead of more service-specific writing service review platforms like Pick The Writer or Writing Judge. I’m sure you can tell which of these options would reach a more targeted audience for writing businesses.
This exercise helps with insight into issues like your brand positioning, product and service updates, and much more. Consider marketing analytics as your marketing cheat sheet. The broad categories that a proper marketing analysis gives you invaluable insight into the following:
You will learn your product’s advantages and perception
To glean this product intelligence data, companies would have to engage current and potential customers via direct conversations, polls, surveys, and so on. It will give them insight into what sets their product apart and give them an edge over competitors.
You will also see product improvement trends
Marketing analysis not only shows you your product’s advantages, but it will also set you up for future product updates by revealing the types of product features customers want.
You will learn your customer’s ad preferences and trends
Different customer groups generally perceive marketing campaigns differently. This insight helps you understand how your customers see your ad messaging and creativity by showing you the ads that are converting and the ones that they overlook. It will also show you which of your products they tend to purchase most of the time, which ones they’ve been researching, and to what extent.
You will discover where customer support is needed
The ideal sales process should be as uncomplicated as possible at every point, but this isn’t always the case. Analytics will help you identify the aspects of your customer’s buying journey that are steep and unnecessarily complex. Maybe the product search feature does not bring up search-specific results, or perhaps the checkout process is long and winding. These insights will help you fix them.
You will discover your customer’s preferred media
Proper data analysis here will show you the preferred marketing channels your ideal customers like to use. This analytics works for traditional and digital marketing initiatives. You will be able to tell which channel or a mix of channels will engage your target audience at the highest level.
You will be able to measure the gap between you and your competitor’s marketing efforts.
You do not want to be behind your competitors when it comes to market share, sales, and revenue. Thankfully, this insight will show you the points in your marketing blueprint where your competitors are doing better so that you can course-correct.
You will be able to predict future results
If you’ve got marketing campaigns that deliver optimal results, all you’ll need to do is apply the knowledge of that campaign when setting up future campaigns. This tactic is as close as it gets to predicting future results and boosting ROI.
Analyzing marketing data does have its challenges
Theoretically, having access to more data means that you can analyze a larger sample size of marketing campaigns to gain the insights mentioned above. However, the massive quantity of data available to today’s marketers also makes the analysis process cumbersome.
This scenario creates another problem. Now, marketers have to devise a means to organize the data into a format that is more digestible and easier to handle. This organizing also needs to happen without harming the integrity of the results from the analysis process.
The major obstacles to marketing analytics in today’s data-driven world include:
The sheer quantity of data
As mentioned earlier, Big data is both a blessing and a problem. On the one hand, marketers everywhere can record the tiniest details of a consumer’s experience. But it’s one thing to have data and another to structure it in a way that allows for proper analytics. This research that most marketers spend more time structuring and formatting data than they do analyzing it.
Data scientists are in short supply
Big data is available to all but a real task to organize into usable formats. Worse still, data scientists with the knowledge and skill to handle it are in short supply. According to The CMO, only an abysmal 1.9% of companies believe they have the right personnel for their marketing analytics needs.
Choosing the right attribution model
Attribution models help you draw the link between conversions and each of your marketing channels. Because all attribution models are focused differently, they will each give you varying insights. And since most companies have a marketing presence on a few channels, it is often an arduous task to select the right model.
Looking at and comparing data from disparate sources
Data from different marketing channels — whether online or offline — attribution models and, therefore, are measured by varying attribution models. Owing to this disparity, you have to find a way to correlate all your data so that you can see how they compare. You will need a unified marketing measurement and analytics platform that serves to ‘omnify’ your data for better organization and analysis.
To get past these marketing analytics hurdles, you’ll need premium marketing analytics software. This software helps to gather, organize, and compare humongous amounts of critical data. They also do these at lightning speed. This speed can give marketers the ability to implement real-time tweaks to their marketing campaigns.
Steps to take in your marketing analytics process
If you’re looking to embark on analytics for your marketing campaigns, remember that the analytics process will look different for different companies for all the reasons above. But the objective is the same: to glean ways to strengthen your campaigns and optimize conversions and ROI. So although methodologies will differ, every marketing analytics effort needs the following principal steps to arrive at success.
Be sure you understand the aspects you want to measure
Your attribution model will help you identify the right aspects of your marketing campaign to measure, and there are many of them. From conversion rates and leads captured to brand recognition and marketing budget, the list goes on. In other words, be sure you fully understand the problem you are seeking a solution for and the insights you want to gain before you take the first step.
Set a benchmark for success/failure
After you have decided on the aspects of your campaign to measure, you have to determine what success (or failure) would look like for your campaign. How would you determine if a marketing campaign is succeeding or failing?
Let’s paint a little picture. If the goal for your marketing campaign is to boost brand awareness, then a percentage increase in customer brand loyalty would be a good indicator of campaign success, and not impressions or online clicks. Of course, the flip side would be that a percentage decrease in customer brand loyalty is a sign of campaign failure.
Take a look at your weaknesses and strengths
When it comes to marketing, no company is perfect. The trade-off is that there is always room to improve. What you should do at this point is to check out what your company is doing in marketing. Be honest about identifying the weak points in your marketing. Whether they are offline or online initiatives, assessing them honestly is a massive step in strengthening your campaign efforts.
Leverage a marketing analytics tool
The amount of data you have to analyze as a marketer can sometimes feel like all the chemical elements on a periodic table. If you think that way, a marketing analytics tool will serve as your periodic table cheat sheet.
No one can analyze today’s massive data without a marketing analytics tool. This truth will only grow more critical in the coming years as customer preferences, and behavior become more complex, and datasets continue to burgeon. Preferably, you should find an analytics solution that utilizes a unified marketing measurement attribution model. This way, you’ll be able to look at all your marketing data under one roof, regardless of the data source.
Final Words
In our rapidly evolving world, changes in marketing trends and consumer behavior are happening at breakneck speed. It is up to every entrepreneur, business owner, and marketer to keep abreast of these changes and tweak their marketing campaigns accordingly.
For this, you’ll need to fully understand what reliable marketing analytics entails and the steps to take to ensure the analysis of your marketing campaigns leads to success for your business. There are a plethora of marketing data and marketing analytics tools to help you out in this regard. You’d be risking your business success and bottom line if you do not take advantage of them.
Author Bio
John Edwards is a writing specialist who is looking for ways of self-development in the field of writing and blogging. New horizons in his beloved business always attract with their varieties of opportunities. Therefore, it is so important for him to do the writing.
