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How does Marketing Analytics Help Marketers and Consumers?
How does Marketing Analytics Help Marketers and Consumers?
Marketing Analytics is the process that combines and consolidates all the marketing initiatives by a single marketer and views its efficiency and success. This is done by seeing the performance of each initiative, like blogging versus social media promotions versus channel communications. It uses business metrics like ROI (Return on Investment. 78% of B2B companies judge marketing based on revenue. Marketing analytics is getting popular by the day with businesses here.
Why is Marketing Analytics important?
With technology coming up in this digital era, most marketers make decisions based on just the company's digital marketing scenario and website metrics. They fail to look at the entire marketing picture. Looking at only social media data or web analytics is not enough. Marketing analytics considers all the aspects at once and helps plan an efficient program.
In search marketing, one of the most critical performance metrics is keywords. They speak the mind of current customers. It is a keyword contained within each click. They help in determining product design, customer surveys, industry trends, and customer support.
What Can You Do With Marketing Analytics?
It tells you how the marketing initiatives are performing in the present time, what can be done to improve them, how they compete with competitors, where time and money are going, what channels are being used, allocation of marketing resources, and prioritizing investments for future.
Problems Solved By Marketing Analytics
Feeling of reporting for reporting's sake
The analytics keep in mind the company's goals when making a marketing strategy. It is essential to compile data with a plan in place.
Not being able to unify data
Getting the data out of spreadsheets and unifying them so that more time is spent on acting on insights rather than reporting a task.
Revenue and sales are not changing with marketing strategy
ROIs are not just based on monthly projections and values but can affect sales.
Metrics don't align with actions to drive outcomes
The contribution by each marketing campaign synergistically adds up to influence sales to show the credibility of a plan and show long-term success.
Struggling with forecasting
Marketing should take responsibility at the early stages of the revenue cycle and improve future sales. Marketing analytics helps find new opportunities which will yield in the future as it tracks each revenue cycle.
Components of Marketing Analytics
Centralized database
Analytics trace detailed marketing data and bring it in one place like past data which includes trends, pricing, etc. This is the primary job of analytics.
Time-based analytics
Operational system needs to store historical data for analytics to understand marketing trends and patterns. Most marketing and sales solutions are operational; they don't store historical information. This means marketers have to analyze metrics from the past and manually capture this data and organize it into spreadsheets. But, time-series analytics is beneficial in seeing the complete picture of performance trends over a long period because then the engine can see beyond point-in-time insight.
Enhanced capability of attribution
When all the data is in a single place, it is easy to understand and analyze what affects sales., but this is possible only with attribution reporting. Most marketing solutions offer essential attribution capacity that is first or last touch attribution or multi-touch attribution limited by time horizon. It is crucial to understand attribution limitations before buying any technology.
Good and straightforward insights
It is not necessary for a marketer to be a business analyst. So you should have a user-friendly platform so that it's easy to learn technology, build custom reports, etc. Marketing solutions should offer tools that are efficient and easy to use.
Ad-hoc reporting
Ad-hoc reports are customized according to data by marketing analysts. Table-like reports and charts are most effective to read and follow through.
Methods to Analyze Marketing Program
This will take more work upfront but make the process of analysis more straightforward in the long run.
1. First touch or last touch attribution
Single attribution is a standard marketing analytic strategy. It allocates all value to the prospect's first or final interaction. This credits the lead generation strategy regardless of the time of sale. For example, if an SEO-optimized landing page gets a new lead from a web search that later takes you to a branded content, engages you to social media, and then attends a trade show before signing up as a customer, this assigns the value sale to the campaign. Last touch attribution happens when a business is closed and done. For instance, a trade show is a sale.
2. Single attribution leading to projection in sales
Single attribution is simple. Companies with long sales cycles need to hire marketing analysts on a longer account. Revenue cycles use all the data available for campaigns to check marketing plans.
3. Attribution using many people and programs
A single marketing technique cannot affect a sale. You try to determine what caused a sale by working backward from a sale. Every click is traced and analyzed. Some assumptions are necessary for this. It is vital to make sure you are prepared to defend them to C-suite, or the whole process might get invalidated.
4. Test groups and control groups
It measures the real values and not the assumed values, making it more reliable. This requires extra strategy in planning a program that can be tested. Apply the factor you want to test to one part of the target market. The audience is divided into two groups to measure basic metrics.
5. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM)
This measures how each marketing touch and non-marketing variables impact sales volume. There are complex equations that consider advertising, distribution, pricing, economic conditions, and product. It is a time, and labor-consuming procedure, and only 3% of B2B marketers use it.
Steps to Marketing Analytics Success
1. Using a balanced assortment of all techniques
Analytic assortment should combine techniques for-
- Reporting on the past
- Analyzing the present.
Influencing future marketing strategies- Focusing on underperforming areas.
2. Assess analytic capacities and adapt and improve
For instance, a marketing organization can collect data from online and POS transactions but miss out on social media sources and call-center logs, which is unstructured but equally crucial. This data can be converted to real insights. Start where your needs are and fill in the gaps over time.
3. Act on what you learn
Analytics help you improve the overall marketing program by identifying channel deficiencies, adjusting and changing strategies whenever needed, optimizing processes, and gaining customer insight.
Without evaluating the marketing program, one would never know if it's working. Marketing analytics lead to better supply versus demand planning, price optimization, and management, leading to better sales.
Online Marketing Tips
Keyword research
If it is stagnant, it neglects trends and new information on products.
Paid search marketing campaigns
Group keywords and add appropriate ad text to improve quality score. This improves ad position and lowers bids.
Analyzing results
Displaying keywords in ad text to improve search and make it more relevant.
Repeat ad nauseum
Negative keywords are good as they prevent unnecessary clicks, making sure the ad appears for only applicable searches.
ROI of Marketing Analytics Program
1. Marketing analytics build credibility
Use of sophisticated technology to make marketing decisions. Marketers who measure performance create more value; this gives them 5% increase in returns and 7% more growth performance.
2. Better efficacy, time, and money-saving
Single platform is needed for all purposes. It is simplified. With an integrated analytics approach, you can save 15% to 20% marketing spend.
3. Marketing analytics cause faster revenue growth
With marketing numbers, one can focus on growing profits and revenue.
