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Building A Marketing Analytical Framework

Marketing Analytics - Essentials of Cross-Selling and Upselling

Data is considered as the new raw material in business: a famous inspiring quote states. Analyzing this quote, we can all come up with the understanding that a successful business can't be formed without its data. And here comes the story of every marketer, "Marketing Analytics." Summing it up, it feels like "NO DATA, NO MARKET."

The development of several small and larger organizations has resulted in an enormous amount of consumer data. Proper analysis of these data is always crucial for future marketing decisions. However, the interpretation of the data is still a challenge. Marketing analytics thereby enables the marketers to increase the efficiency of their marketing strategy. Benefiting the customers and the consumers, the main aim lies in optimizing the Return of Investment (ROI), which can be achieved through getting an insight into the customer requirements and preferences, ensuring a future market of targeted products.

The development of several small and larger organizations has resulted in an enormous amount of consumer data. Proper analysis of these data is always crucial for future marketing decisions. However, the interpretation of the data is still a challenge. Marketing analytics thereby enables the marketers to increase the efficiency of their marketing strategy. Benefiting the customers and the consumers, the main aim lies in optimizing the Return of Investment (ROI), which can be achieved through getting an insight into the customer requirements and preferences, ensuring a future market of targeted products.

Importance and challenges associated with Marketing Analytics

A better understanding of marketing analytics is highly recommendable if the marketers do not feel like spending a lot of money on wasted web marketing. The Harvard business review produced a survey highlighting that Around 80% of the respondents have been dissatisfied with their capability to calculate marketing ROI. And only a few, around 20%, agreed that they applied something meaningful. Marketing analytics is, therefore, a useful aspect, which could give insight into the business and allow monitoring of every campaign and its outcomes. Therefore, the marketers could use every penny effectively. A few challenges associated with Marketing Analytics are:

  • Analytics data can ease the decision-making process of businesses and help their growth irrespective of the organization's size. The highly selective nature of the customers has signified the importance of marketing analytics. Therefore accurate analysis of the data is always a promising thing as the brands have to completely rely on these analytics to draw the attention of the customers.
  • Analytics data can ease the decision-making process of businesses and help their growth irrespective of the organization's size. The highly selective nature of the customers has signified the importance of marketing analytics. Therefore accurate analysis of the data is always a promising thing as the brands have to completely rely on these analytics to draw the attention of the customers.
  • The digital age is marked by the "Big data" scenario allowing the easy storage of minimalistic search details of the consumer. However, non-structured data creates a mess leading to improper data analysis. Therefore becoming a challenge for the data scientist, as most of their time is devoted to the formatting of the data despite analyzing it. Further, only around 1.9% of organizations have been reported to be having qualified people for data analysis, making it a larger challenge.
  • Selecting a model for getting an insight into the market data is quite challenging. Depending on what type of information the marketers want to retrieve, an analysis model must be chosen. Researchers have emphasized the use of computers in the decision-making process of an organization.

Starting with Marketing Analytics

01 Building a structure for data tracking

It is widely helpful if you have a lot of data, but lesser knowledge of effectively using it results in failure. The analysis of the data further requires the following approach:

  • Setting up your plan: HP is reputed for being a leading global PC manufacturer.Once a client starts buying a computer from them, the website displays upsellsthrough various protection plans and warranties. Apart from this, they likewise include visual indicators for pushing clients toward those plans which are more comprehensive.
  • Taking action: A marketing research plan won't be a success unless the plan is implemented upon. This is the step when you finally know what step of your plan is working and what's not. Tools like Google Analytics might be used for collecting and storing data, while Google tag manager might help in assessing the behavior of the data.
  • Data scientist: Hiring a data scientist might be an important step in market analysis. An organization, having several analytical tasks at hand, completing those, and coming up to a conclusion is vital. Therefore it's always valuable to correctly utilize the manpower for an effective analytical approach.
  • Reporting: The reporting stage displays the data that you are analyzing to take the planned actions. Google analytics reports showcase the data in the form of metrics.
  • Optimization of the data: Implementing and carrying out the analysis interprets the activities affecting the business. Based on the analytics, marketers might start fixing the things which are not working.

02 Creating UTMs

To assess the web traffic, marketers plan to create UTMs (urchin tracking modules), which are parameters added to the end of URLs. Therefore Google analytics provides detailed information of who's searching your site, like the name of the source, type of traffic, and the purpose. Google Campaign URL Builder assists in the creation of UTMs. However, several other tools also exist other than this. Once the UTM has been successfully created, the next step is confirming whether the UTM has been shown in Google Analytics in a way that's expected.

Marketing analytics Framework

A framework for marketing analysis is defined as a tool for studying the market of services provided by companies. The companies and organizations, therefore, get to know the competitive dynamics of their services. In spite of the quality of a product, the market of the product needs to be identified for a successful launch of the product. A wrong market might lead to a significant loss of the companies. Therefore marketing analysis framework provides a means to get a detailed idea of the unexplored opportunities that the product holds. The tool might assist the marketers in calculating the costs associated with returns and future aspects of the product investing in a specific market.

Several such frameworks have been proposed, which are mostly modifications of earlier frameworks. However, research has shown that integrating traditional marketing models with novel frameworks results in a thorough analysis of the data. An Analytical framework is generally composed of a theoretical framework preceding a conceptual framework. The theoretical framework usually represents the problem in a general sense; however, the conceptual framework often consists of an analysis plan. A few popular and important market analytics frameworks are SWOT analysis, Porter's five forces, PEST analysis, Growth share matrix, and Perceptual matrix.

Building a Marketing Analytical Framework

Several marketers have defined different stages for building an analytical framework. If you are planning for an online campaign, the mentioned analytical framework might be of importance

Defining goals: Goals should be set up on whether to increase sales or drive the sales with the ultimate objective of always retaining the latter one.

Identifying markets: A few points have to be noted while addressing the target markets considering the demographic traits, Psychographic characteristics, and behavioral actions.

The 4P's related to marketing has to be considered.

Product: what's the product and associated items that the customers receive in addition to the buying item.

Pricing: how the product is being priced and how does it varies across channels.

Place: it signifies the location where the product is bought by the customers.

Promotion: this holds the information of incentives and limits the quality of the product.

A medium has to be chosen to transfer the products to the customers in the market.

Product presentation is another important part where the creativity of the product lies in relation to branding, etc.

Continuous testing in media, creativity and target markets should be carried out to improve the marketing of the product. This could be achieved by identifying factors for improvement.

The final end of every campaign is the assessment of results that will determine the effectiveness of achieving the desired goals.

A case study revolving around the world-famous market for analytical software explained how they end up building their own framework that resulted in increasing web traffic and conversions. Their success is defined through the following steps of their framework.

Modern-day organizations must be analytical: Things always keep on happening worldwide, generating an enormous amount of data. Therefore analytics should be an essential part of the survival of every business. However, people always tend to consider their experiences and past experiences, which they have to overcome through another approach to look at the future. And therefore, with this evolution, a structured approach is a must to tackle the decision-making process of campaign implementation and modification. In the case of this marketer, renovation at ground level was continued integrating different channels. Their framework enabled them to work in various areas.

Independent to shared services: An iterative approach was used to develop this framework for integrating marketing resources and organizing them with a customer-centric view.

Go-to-market strategy: In this strategy, a better engagement with the customers is expected as the customer analytics directs the future marketing plans. Basically, two areas are mainly focused: "Revenue and growth marketing" and "retention and loyalty marketing." The former focuses on the addition of quality through demand, and the latter focuses on nurturing the existing customers.

Another review summarized the following stages for an analytical framework of an organization for sales growth and cost reduction.

Stage 1: The focus of the organization should lie in information cost reduction and target through direct mail or catalogs, thereby reducing the costs of postal charges.

Stage 2: Marketers exchange data through external sources. The analytical model then simulates customer's past experiences for effective customer segmentation.

Stage 3: Interchange of both internal and external data occurs, focusing on identifying which solution will lead to a huge impact on their business.

Stage 4: The strategy is to allow real-time online communication between the company and the customer's preferred channel to identify their needs. This, as a result, leads to a direct increase in sales.

Conclusion

Marketing Analytics might be a frightening approach for beginners, but with the availability of guides and courses, one might start their analytics process without hesitation. Also, with the development of analytics platforms, marketers who are not well guided might go for their analytics reports. The application of the analytical framework in several domains of the market led to their significant evolution. An independently owned large organization has been operating in a highly competitive environment against several other new entries. Applying marketing analytics through the platform by "Due North," the company saw a double increase in sales within six months. Similarly, a world-renowned bank struggled to get the highest return on their investment. When the problem was addressed through the analytics platform governed by "Marketing evolution," there was a 100% increase in the ROI.