In the algorithmically-nourished business world of today, everything is tied to data. The moment you lose connection with data, your organization is reduced to a strategically incapacitated entity. Add to this, the challenge of satisfying the new breed of knowledgeable customers who are averse to giving you a second chance for any of your shortcomings. Hence, your marketing efforts will fetch impactful outcomes only when they are attuned to what your target audience desires. You need marketing analytics to mind-read customers, take commensurate actions, measure the efficacy of those actions, identify the gaps, and then reenter the ring with vigor after doing necessary rectifications.
According to a 2014 American Marketing Association survey, nearly 31% of marketers in the US had integrated marketing analytics into their company’s day-to-day operations. While a more recent survey from Salesforce says over half (56%) of high-performing marketing teams are heavily leveraging marketing analytics. Underlining a similar mood, a study done by Forrester on behalf of Google has revealed that as high as 87% of sophisticated marketers in North America have improved the overall performance of marketing programs through the use of marketing analytics. Even in the B2B domain, upwards of 60% of marketers around the globe are making a splash as marketing analytics has pushed up their sales revenue between 11% and 50%. It’s time to take cognizance of the ways in which marketing analytics can help you achieve your KPIs and revenue metrics:
Wide span of analysis
When you want to measure how well you are playing with marketing, in reality, you can’t get the correct picture by thinking over only one channel. This is more so because the number of consumer touch-points has increased dramatically. At the same time, the advent of a bunch of new technologies has further complicated matters. Marketing analytics is the perfect solution to skip out on fragmented data environments. It will rather go deep into all marketing initiatives across the full spectrum of channels to show the extent of realization of ROI.
Making sense of topical marketing trends
A top-class marketing analytics platform is not designed to work in a confined manner. In other words, it will not only throw brilliant light on what’s happening as regards to marketing at different points of customer interaction but will also let you know about the hottest marketing trends prevailing in general. So, you can take your cue from them and incorporate their subtleties into your own strategy.
Attracts reverence for data as an asset of strategic significance
Analytics relies on data to serve you valuable insights. Today, we want analytical insights to be made available to all the business users and employees at any rung of the ladder. However, it’s equally important to protect data from going into wrong hands. Sounds like a bit of a conflicting situation? This can be ironed out easily if you can maintain a balance between data security and data access for marketing analytics. Eventually, you will carve out a role for yourself in data handling and governance.
Having a better grasp over the social space
Being social-savvy is now a prerequisite for your marketing initiatives to succeed. Marketing analytics in conjunction with social media analytics can figure out those people who are mostly influencing the conversations around your brand, thereby assisting you to launch campaigns focused on customer value. Social media is also coming up as a great tool to control, monitor, influence, and personalize customer journeys. But all this can be made possible only through effective analytics.
Tracing visitors’ entry route and customer journeys
Traffic follows different paths to land on your website. It may be via a link placed on any other site, a social networking platform, search results, or an advertisement. If you have information about inbound traffic movement right on the button, you can boost the marketing tempo for the sources that are lagging in traffic generation. Once you find where your prospects are, you can monitor and influence their journey till the time they become your customers.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t
Channel attribution analytics is a vital part of marketing analytics. It tells you which channels are performing better than others and what kind of return on investments you are generating. It gives powerful insights to marketers who can use the attribution data to understand cross-channel customer behavior and strategically allocate their marketing budgets based on channel performance.
Gauging content acceptance
Good content is capable of augmenting the “stickiness” of your website to a great extent; while inferior content can be responsible for putting you on the receiving end of visitors’ wrath. As such, it’s always an excellent idea to apply analytics to determine which type of content on your site is bringing home your marketing message to visitors.
Oil the wheels of finer personalization
With marketing analytics, you get a handle on the peculiarities of customer behavior, which is especially fruitful in customizing products, services, and digital presence to their liking. In addition, you can anticipate with a considerable degree of accuracy whether a campaign will elicit positive or negative responses.
To conclude
The profound urgency of interpreting the never-ending streams of data has forced analytics to evolve into a discipline that marketers can rely on. However, before deploying marketing analytics tools, you should be aware of certain best practices. First and foremost, be sure to see in the post-deployment phase how marketing initiatives are stacking up against your top business goals. Only select those tools that seamlessly integrate with other marketing as well as business tools. Also, be prepared to fix compatibility issues that may come to the fore while hooking up new-age marketing analytics tools with legacy systems. Finally, don’t forget to foster the development of a culture inside your organization where various teams can collaborate and utilize marketing insights for overall business development.
The outer facade of marketing has undergone plenty of changes on the back of technological fluidity. However, if you look at the innards of it, you will find the unmodified basic principle: engaging with customers at the right time with the right offer. Since marketing analytics decodes the hidden signals in data flowing out of every marketing channel one can conceive of, it enables you to enjoy a comprehensive view. Thus, you are empowered to base your decisions on verified facts and make everyday decisions with greater confidence.