What is Marketing Analytics? Steps to Get Benefits

What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is the practice of operating and understanding data metrics to figure out the ROI of marketing endeavours like, blog posts, calls-to-action (CTAs), thought leadership pieces and channel performance, and it also helps in identifying chances for improvement.

Through tracking and reporting the performance data, metrics of diagnostic and major indicator metrics, the marketing team will be able to generate answers to the analytics questions which are most important to business stakeholders.

Marketing analytics helps in providing deeper insight into customer preferences and trends. Despite various benefits, a majority of organisations failed to realise the benefits of marketing analytics.

With the advancement of search engines, paid search marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) and efficient new software solutions, marketing analytics has become more effective and easier to get implemented than ever.

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Steps to Get Benefits From Marketing Analytics

You need to follow the below three steps to get the benefits from marketing analytics:

Practice a balanced collection of analytics methods

In order to get the best benefits from marketing analytics, you need an analytical evaluation that is balanced – that is, one that merges methods for:

Covering the past

Utilising marketing analytics to research on the past. You can answer a few queries such as which campaign component was used to make most income from last quarter?

Exploring the present

Marketing analytics enables you to decide how your marketing activities are acting at this moment by asking questions such as: How are clients doing? Which channels do clients use to gain maximum benefits? What is the reaction of different networking media personnel on the company’s image?

Predicting influencing what’s to come

Marketing analytics can be used to deliver data driven expectations to change the future by putting few inquiries such as: How would we be able to transform here and now win into dedication and continuous engagement? In what capacity, we should include more sales representatives to meet expectations? Which urban communities would be a good idea for us to focus next by utilising our present situation?

Evaluate your analytical capabilities and fill in the gaps

Marketing organisations have an access to a lot of analytical abilities for supporting different marketing goals. Estimating your present analytical capabilities is necessary to attain these goals. It is significant to know about your present situation along with an analytical spectrum, so that you can determine gaps and take steps to create a strategy for filling those gaps.

Consider an example in which a marketing organisation is already gathering data from sources like the Internet and POS transactions, but is not providing importance to the unstructured information coming from social media platforms.

Such unstructured sources are very useful, and the technology for transforming unstructured data into actual insights is available today that can be used by marketers. A marketing organisation can plan and allocate budget for adding these analytical capabilities that can be used to fill that particular gap.

Take action as per analytical findings

In the continuous process of testing and learning, marketing analytics allows you to enhance the performance of your marketing program as a whole by performing the following tasks:

• Determining deficiencies in the channel
• Doing adjustment in strategies and tactics as and when required
• Optimising processes

Due to a lack of capability to test and evaluate the performance of your marketing programs, you would not be able to know what had worked and what had not. Moreover, you would not be able to know whether things needed to be changed or in what manner.

In other words, if you are using marketing analytics for evaluating success and doing nothing with the details gained, then what is the point of using analytics? Marketing analytics enables better, more successful marketing for your efforts and investments. It can lead to better management which helps in generating more revenue and greater profitability.

With the help of efficient marketing metrics and analytics, marketers can determine big-picture marketing trends in a better manner, identify the programs worked and why, monitor market trends over a duration, properly determine the ROI for every program and forecast future returns.

The following are attained commonly through marketing analytics:

• Marketers frequently use main metrics such as lead source monitoring and cost-per-lead without having a comprehensive grasp of how marketing actions affect them.
  
  
• With automatically connecting and unifying your data, you would be able to spend more time acting on insights which were collected through hard work and less time on stressful reporting tasks.
  
  
• Using reports for marketing ROI to make decisions to boost sales.
  
  
• The individual contribution of the marketing programs gets visible and it shows how marketing campaigns are influencing sales at each stage of the customer journey.
  
  
• Offers better visibility towards future revenue. It lets forecasting how many new leads, opportunities, and customers will the marketing gain in future.