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Marketing Analytics and Its Importance

How many times have you made decisions based on your gut feeling? Went straight instead of taking a turn just because your instinct told you to do so? Many of us make gut-based decisions for several small decisions; however, not all of them are reliable.

Would you take similar instinct-based significant decisions for your business without any science-based research? Why leave such important decisions to chance. Let marketing analytics help you support instinct-based decisions backed by the data. Globally, marketing analytics is expected to reach $5.50 billion by 2025

What is marketing analytics?

In simpler terms, marketing analytics is a practice whereby market performance is measured and analyzed to get the best out of the marketing efforts and improve return on investment. It acts as a mirror through which you see your marketing efforts and make better use of your marketing budget.

From content marketing metrics to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings, marketing analytics applies to all facets of the business.

It is worth mentioning here that marketing analytics and marketing metrics are two different things. Marketing analytics put metrics in context and show how marketing efforts transform into desired results.

Why does an organization need a digital marketing strategy?

Unlike in the past, where you wouldn't know where business leads came from, whether through the hoarding you had put across various strategic locations or whether it came through radio advertisements you scheduled, nowadays, digital marketing is the source for leads and information. If you are not making optimum use of marketing analytics, your competitors might be doing it right before you, facing you, and challenging you.

Business organic growth is possible by reaching out to more prospective customers and inspiring them to purchase. To reach out to a bigger group, companies need to take advantage of marketing resources and technologies, and in today's era, the internet tops the list.

The group of target audiences found online is relatively much more significant than you can draw locally. Using marketing strategies, companies can reach a bigger target audience base that is quantifiable and cost-effective.

How analytics helps re-conceptualize marketing during the pandemic

Marketers have had a tough time since the onset of the pandemic. Covid 19 has seen many brands go off-shelf in no time, and at the same time, suppressed the demand for others. Lockdown brought down many business activities to a complete halt and severely disturbed the supply chain. Marketers had to re-align their plans and design completely new strategies.

Scenario planning plays a crucial role in such circumstances, and tougher circumstances often reduce marketing budgets. Here are five ways on how to navigate through the corona period:

Responding to changing customer preference: Consumer habits are rapidly changing under the corona period, for example, high consumption of online streaming content and online news. Online streaming of YouTube went to such an extraordinary level that it had to temporarily reduce the video quality to meet the demand.

Some of these changes can be temporary, while some of them remain long-lasting. Analytics can play an essential role in enabling quicker responses to such opportunities or threats.

Spending marketing budget judiciously: Predictive analysis comes in handy in such situations; instead of cutting down on marketing costs, marketers are required to take a smart approach in choosing programs that lead to a higher return on investments.

Capturing channel performance: Customer journey occurs across various platforms, for example, social media, events, display adverts, etc. Analytics applied in the area of marketing helps you study the effect and measure business value across channels to allow the best marketing investment decisions.

Personalization: While COVID 19 has changed customer journeys, every touchpoint remains key strategic locations to engage customers. Marketers need to use digital channels that offer personalized messages to customers. Relevant, personalized messages to your customers at multiple touchpoints can distinguish your brand from others.

Know your customer: Marketing analytics is all about customers - everything they do. Marketers need to capture customers' online behavior in detail and align them with offline data sources, e.g., demographic - to draw a thorough picture of the customer. By combining the data, you gain insights into customer's needs.

Best Practices - Marketing Analytics

Now that marketing platforms are available to marketing teams, comprising members without analytical understanding or technical know-how, they are knitting data and analytics into their plans like never before. It is essential to follow best practices for utilizing analytics in its best possible manner to transform the consumer journey:

Real-time insights: Your marketing analytic solution cannot be effective if the information is outdated, the solution needs to deliver insights in real-time. Tracking the right metrics in real-time is the key.

High-quality data: The whole premise of your analytics depends on the quality of your data. This means that you need structured and unstructured data from all sources possible.

Impeccable dashboard: Instead of running behind as many metrics as possible, which eventually leads to unwanted data, it is better to define your goals and measure results for the more important cases.

Predict and prescribe: while it is important to have real-time insights, it is also vital to use predictive tools to better implement marketing analytics. You need to analyze data, make accurate predictions, and make data-enabled decisions to improve the consumer journey.

Analytics visualization: Marketing teams should be able to draw inferences out of data for gaining meaningful insights. It is crucial to choose an appropriate data visualization tool so that you can easily interpret the data and find patterns. Customization of visualization tools is important rather than default charts for presenting data.

Importance of marketing analytics

Companies that don't make data-driven marketing decisions are not getting optimum return on investment. Marketing analytics empowers businesses to make better-informed decisions. Consumers today are demanding a personalized experience, and if you wish to deliver them what they expect, you need to be doing data-driven marketing. Let us take a look at how marketing analytics can benefit your organization.

To learn from the previous strategies: An organization can gather insights, using marketing analytics, how the previous strategies worked for them and where they did not, and study why results shaped in a particular way. By studying previous actions and results, marketing teams can repeat the successes and avoid making mistakes.

To define strategies in the present: Marketing analytics, on the one hand, offers insights from past activities. It also provides information on the current marketing efforts and how it is performing. Real-time status helps marketers enhance their current campaigns in real-time. This helps determine whether there is a need to make some changes to avoid errors or make developments.

Forecasting/what might happen: Marketing analytics offers predictive modeling such as collaborative filtering, regression analysis, propensity models, and clustering. Using such tools can help to forecast changes in consumer behavior. Sophisticated statistical algorithms can help in accelerating the process and forecasting possible future outcomes. The goal of marketing analytics for the future is to shift from a rear-view approach to an emphasis on the future.

Optimize efforts: Essentially, it is about translating findings into research objectives. Marketers need to gather customer feedback. This is important to bridge the gap between marketing strategy and activations.

Locating "ideal" customers: Did it ever surprise you how people find out about your store or company's portal? Automation and analytics can help you locate how your prospective customers are reaching you. Knowing each social media your potential customer frequents, what time of the day, and time spent on these platforms can help you effectively design your marketing campaigns. Marketers can use a lot of data to learn about each individual who visits their website and/or store. Analytics provides demographic details about a user's online behaviors and can help you find an ideal customer.

Benefits of Marketing Analytics

Now that we know the importance of marketing analytics, let us also look at few benefits.

Personalized campaigns: Marketing analytics can help you design targeted campaigns with a personalized message for each customer. Data provides you an insight into each customer, their lifestyle, online activity, and interests. Data can further guide you to design your content marketing strategy and identify when and where to post ads.

Consistent messaging: Analytics can be used across several modes of communication. Insights provided by analytics ensure that messaging remains aligned and consistent.

What's working and what's not: To identify where your time and money should be spent, you need to detect which particular content is leading prospects through the sales funnel.

Audience segmentation: One thing that needs to be strictly avoided is sending out one standard communication to all your prospective customers. At the same time, you can apply the same tactics to every prospect. You need to be able to segment and organize your prospects' demographics, habits, and behaviors.

Knowing customers beforehand: Analytics helps you know your customers before they get anything from you. Data allows you to know your customers' preferences and tastes to target them with personalized messages and convince them to do business with you.

Product development: To have better product success, you need to tailor-made the features of your product to match what the customer wants. Analytics can help you to locate the desires of your prospective audience.

Create a buzz: Launching a new product doesn't automatically means that it will create buzz on its own. Marketing analytics creates need and demand for your product. Prospects will aim at buying once they know how it can better their lives.

Opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling: Marketing analytics can share insights with you to help move prospects through the sales funnel faster and more cost-efficiently. It further helps you identify untapped opportunities for cross-selling through the funnel that you might not have noticed earlier.

Data can also share insights to keep customers engaged post-sale. This can lead to converting a customer to a loyal customer. Understanding of buyer's journey that marketing analytics offers can influence customers to choose an up-selling/upgrade.

Personalized marketing: When you reach the right customer at the right time along with the right message, you will be able to convert them from prospect to customer. Once you identify and know your ideal customer, you can tailor-make the marketing tactics for them. Marketing analytics gives you an insight into such areas where you require improvements.

Better experience for your customers: Marketing analytics provides insights into your prospects, and with such insights, you not only bring more revenue for your organization, but you also provide a better buying journey experience for your customer.

Today, customers are bombarded with numerous emails every day. Most of these emails, carrying advertisements, go to the trash. People don't like to be exposed too much to ads that aren't relevant to them. Analytics can give you necessary information about who your target audience is and what kind of ads they are interested in.

When customers realize that you care about their buying journey experience, they will eventually become more loyal to your brand.

Marketing Analytics: Endless opportunities

Marketing analytics can be used for almost anything that can be measured, possibilities are endless. It can be leveraged from the simplest of a bar to a full-size dataset around which you can create an entire campaign. The longer you wait to leverage the power of analytics, the further behind you fall in the race.