Marketing analytics is the practice of using data to evaluate the effectiveness and success of marketing activities. Marketing analytics allows you to gather deeper consumer insights, optimize your marketing objectives, and get a better return on investment.
Marketing analytics benefits both marketers and consumers. This analysis allows marketers to achieve higher ROI on marketing investments by understanding what is successful in driving either conversions, brand awareness, or both. Analytics also ensures that consumers see a greater number of targeted, personalized ads that speak to their specific needs and interests, rather than mass communications that tend to annoy.
Marketing data can be analyzed using a variety of methods and models depending on the KPIs being measured. For example, analysis of brand awareness relies upon different data and models than analysis of conversions. Some popular analytics models and methods include:
In the modern marketing landscape, accurate data is more important than ever. Consumers have become highly selective in choosing the branded media they engage with and the media they ignore.
If brands want to catch the ideal buyer’s attention, they must rely on accurate data to create targeted personal ads based on individual interests, rather than broader demographic associations. This will allow marketing teams to serve the right ad, at the right time, on the right channel to move consumers down the sales funnel.
Marketing analytics data helps your business make decisions on everything from ad spend to product updates, branding and more. To give yourself a true 360 degree view of your campaigns and be sure you are making the right decisions, it's important to take data from multiple sources (online and offline). Using this data, your team can gain insights into the following:
Product intelligence involves taking a deep dive into the brand’s products as well as analyzing how those products stack up within the market. Typically done by speaking to consumers, polling target audiences or engaging them with surveys, organizations can better understand the differentiators and competitive advantages of their products. From there, teams can better align products to the unique consumer interests and problems that help drive conversions.
Analytics can tell a lot about your consumers. What messaging / creative resonates with them? Which products are they buying and which have they researched in the past? Which ads are leading to conversions and which are ignored?
Analytics can also offer insight into the types of product features consumers want. Marketing teams can pass this information on to product development for future iterations.
Analytics also helps uncover areas of the buyer’s journey that could be simplified or improved. Where are your clients struggling? Are there ways you can simplify your product or make the check-out process easier?
Data analysis can determine where marketers choose to display messages for particular consumers. This has become especially important due to the sheer number of channels. In addition to traditional marketing channels such as print, television and broadcast, marketers must also know which digital channels and social media networks consumers prefer. Analytics answers these key questions:
How do your marketing efforts compare with the competition? How can you close that gap if there is one? Are there opportunities your competitors are capitalizing on that you may have missed?
If you have a thorough understanding of why a campaign worked, you’ll be able to apply that knowledge to future campaigns for increased ROI.
The biggest challenge of the analysis process is understanding and utilizing the immense quantity of data marketers. This means that marketers must determine how to best organize the data into a digestible format to derive actionable insights.
Some of the biggest marketing analytics challenges faced today are:
Marketing analytics software combats the above challenges by collecting, organizing and correlating valuable data quickly, allowing marketers to make real-time campaign optimizations.
Modern marketing platforms are valuable for the speed at which they can store and process massive amounts of data. One of the major drawbacks of having access to so much data is that marketers cannot possibly parse through it all in time to make real-time optimizations. That’s where the processing power of advanced analytics platforms comes into play, enabling marketers to adjust creative or ad placement as needed before the campaign ends, enhancing potential ROI.
Additionally, many platforms including marketing Evolution, leverage unified marketing measurement, to normalize and aggregate marketing data from across various channels and campaigns, simplifying analysis.
Finally, advanced analytics platforms go beyond measuring consumer engagements to offer insights into brand equity and how certain audience segments react to creative elements. This helps marketers better determine brand-building ROI, as well as how to further personalize branded experiences.
When implementing a marketing analytics solution, consider these key features and capabilities:
3. Optimize Your Plan: Once you implement your plan, make adjustments to your team or data flow based on your results in order to move leads down the sales funnel quicker.
As marketing teams seek to conduct quality analysis that lead to more engaging, profitable campaigns, they must focus on employing analytics managers who can:
If you’re looking to enhance analytics capabilities, here are four steps to take at the outset of your program:
There are many aspects to a marketing campaign you can measure: conversion rates, leads captured and brand recognition, to name a few. Understand the problem you are trying to solve or insight you are trying to glean when beginning to analyze your data.
What does a successful campaign look like? This will determine the types of data and metrics marketers collect. For example, if the goal is to increase brand awareness – the success benchmark might be an increased percentage of brand loyalty demonstrated in a customer panel, rather than an online click or impression.
What is your company doing today? What are your weak spots? Whether assessing offline campaign results or identifying media most likely to convert, understanding these weak points can help you strengthen your program.
Marketing analytics tools will increase in importance as consumers become more selective and datasets grow. An advanced platform, such as our Marketing Measurement and Optimization Platform uses unified marketing measurement to help marketers identify the messages that resonate and the types of media that converts. This provides a holistic view of which campaigns are successful and which are underperforming in real time.
Having the right marketing analytics solution in place is key to a successful marketing program. By understanding where your audience is engaging and what is truly driving sales, you can make sure you are putting your money in the right place and improve ROI.