Every business needs a well-structured marketing strategy to grow. Only then it can stand a chance to survive in the current market. If you’re a marketer, then you have to be good with data and numbers. As, you have to be competent enough to analyze these numbers, to map out a perfect marketing plan. If your business has already scaled to a certain extent, then you can’t just rely on intuition, instead, you should spend most of your time around analytics to make well-informed decisions for your company.

However, if you can’t think of yourself as a data wiz, then you have to come to the right place.

Marketing analytics has a lot of elements. Without having proper knowledge about them, you can’t properly culminate your thought process within your marketing strategies.

Therefore, in this article, I have decided to discuss every element, related to marketing analytics and tips to improve your marketing game.

So, sit tight because you’re in for a long ride!

What is Marketing Analytics?

First and foremost, let’s talk a little about marketing analytics.

In a nutshell, it’s the process of tracking and evaluating the results of your marketing campaigns to track progress and better understand your customers. Keeping track of active campaign statistics allows marketers to gain valuable observations into consumer behavior, spot trends, and provide vital prospect data to their sales teams. It also aids them in determining which initiatives are yielding results and which are not. A well-drafted analytical report will tell you what is working for the company today, and what might work tomorrow.

However, there is still a debate over the effectiveness of analytics, and whether it can be beneficial in the long run. A major problem among marketers is that, once they have found an effective strategy, they like to stick with it for months. The reality is, you can’t be sure what is working today, will be working tomorrow. You have to rely on analytics and reports to make appropriate changes in your strategies throughout the year. Otherwise, you can’t stay competitive in the market.

Who should be using marketing analytics?

The Marketing department needs someone who has depth in what they are doing. Not everyone can’t map an effective marketing strategy, just by looking at a few reports.

However, there are some individuals who can contribute to your marketing initiatives.

The following are some of the positions that should be paying special attention to marketing analytics:

CMO:- CMO stands for chief marketing officer. As the name suggests, they are responsible for the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. Therefore, they must have complete access to marketing analytics, to make well-informed decisions.

Marketing Director:- Usually marketing directors work closely with CMOs, so they should also see the analytics reports on a routine basis. This can help them to decide the budget required for the marketing initiatives.

Head of Analytics:- They are the person, who is responsible for collecting all types of reports and data from the company. Therefore, they should be aware of the metrics that marketing analyzes on a daily basis.

CRO:- CRO stands for chief revenue officer. They are basically responsible for keeping an eye on the ROI of the marketing campaigns. A proper overview of the analytics can help them determine how much new business and income is generated directly from the lead generation campaigns.

Marketing Analysis:- To put things in perspective, you can say that a marketing analyst is the first person who should have access to the analytics. Since they are ones responsible for curating strategic initiatives based on the analytics and presenting them to their teams.

Head of Business Intelligence:- They are the individuals, who look over every decision made in the company. They have to decide whether every decision can work in harmony, and be beneficial in the long run. So, it is practical that they should have access to marketing analytics.

Common Marketing Analytics terms

Before moving any further, you have got yourself acquainted with some of the important, analytical terms used in the marketing sector.

This will also help you to understand this article better, as I will be using those terms, as we progress further:-

1. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators

KPIs can be referred to as key metrics that marketers monitor to see how effectively their programs are performing in accordance with their objectives. However, every business has different kinds of KPIs depending on their sector.

2. Click-Through Rates

Click through Rates can be defined as the percentage of people who clicked on a sponsored ad, an email, or a website link after seeing a promotional element. For instance, if your marking elements has 100 impressions, and 10 people decide to click on them, then your CTR is 10%

3. PPC or Pay Per Click

This is a popular type of online marketing in which you only spend when someone clicks on your ad. It’s a terrific approach to “purchase” website visitors and only pay for the ones that convert. Google AdWords is a popular pay-per-click service. This can help you to cut your marketing expenses.

4. CPC or Cost Per Click

If you’re opting for a PPC service, then you have to know about CPCs. They are basically the cost, which is calculated depending upon the popularity of the keywords. For instance, if a keyword is searched more, then the chance of it getting clicked increases. So, for those keywords, the cost of using them in ads also increases. The average CPC is around 3$, however, if you are aiming for using popular keywords, it can go up to 10$.

5. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the proportion of website visitors who become paid users, application users, email subscribers, or whatever you refer to as successful conversions. The goal of CRO is to increase the frequency at which consumers convert.

6. ROI or Return On Investment

This is a major one in the marketing sector, yet it’s also the most difficult to quantify. It’s a metric for determining how much money you’ll make from a specific type of marketing. To calculate it, remove the expense of your ad from the amount of revenue it brought in, then divide the result by the marketing costs.

To represent in mathematically,

(revenue generated – campaign cost) ÷ campaign cost x 100 = ROI

7. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of individuals that only view a single page of your website before leaving. For instance, if your website has 100 visitors, and 70 of them decide to leave after viewing one page, then your bounce rate will be 70%.

8. Call To Action

A call to action is the element of your marketing material where you inspire readers to take action once they’ve engaged with it. Customers are frequently encouraged to download a complimentary PDF from B2B articles, restaurants might promote their apps, or marketers might persuade consumers to join their mailing lists.

Benefits of Marketing Analytics

Until now, we had a brief overview of Marketing Analytics and got acquainted with some of its major terms. Now, it’s time to dig a little deep into the topic.

First, let’s understand why you need marketing analytics, or can it really be beneficial for your company in the long run. To answer these questions, let’s talk about some of its benefits:-

1. Unifies All Your Marketing Data

Marketing departments typically manage a variety of initiatives across a variety of platforms and personnel. Bringing data from various sources into one location necessitates a high level of collaboration.

A competent marketing analytics system will help you to keep an eye on all the important tools and resources used by your teams. If you can see every ad and campaign in one single place, then it will be easier for you to compare the results. You can easily identify what’s working for you today, and what can work for your tomorrow.

2. A/B Testing

We all know that you can’t get much out of a raw dataset. To get the most out of this data, Marketing individuals need to evaluate the data and recognize areas that have some room for development. After that, they can use these observations to enhance their future marketing initiatives.

Almost all the marketing analytics platforms have A/B testing software. This could allow you to compare the performance of any two elements of your campaigns in real-time. It might be the design, the copy, and even the retargeting elements.

A/B testing tools are basically there to fine-tune your ads and campaigns. Every change might be small compared to the entire campaign, but a series of fine adjustments can transform a low-converting ad into an effective one.

3. Better Segmentation

As a business owner, you might have figured out that your customers have a diverse palate.

They all have different backgrounds, interests, and demographic profiles, so you can’t just implement a single approach to satisfy each of their tastes.

However, segmenting your customers will help you to categorize similar groups based on certain elements. This can allow you to create tailored strategies that appeal to the tastes of each section.

Marketing analytics will help you to do this Segmentation with ease, as it can record all your consumer data. You can keep analyzing your campaign data and making changes to your client profiles as needed.

4. Better Cost Per Acquisition(CPA)

CPA is an essential element when it comes to marketing. It can decide the make or break of your business.

A marketing analytics platform can monitor the effectiveness of all your campaigns in a unified place. This can allow you to quickly determine which are the most effective approaches, and which type of audience has the lowest CPA. Then, you can improve your marketing ROI by investing more extensively in these areas in the future.

Moreover, you can also compare your CPA with the average CPA in your industry and see how you stack up against your peers.

Challenges You Might Face While Evaluating Marketing Analytics

If you’re in marketing, you can’t say that you have figured out a strategy that could work throughout the year. Since this marketing environment is constantly changing, you have come up with new and innovative ideas throughout the year.

To put it simply, you have to learn the art of depicting the customer’s interests, even before their demands arise. Over, then you will be able to attract high-quality leads and make a hefty profit.

Let’s see some of the challenges you might face while going down the road of marking analytics:-

1. Lack of Data Knowledge

The most important thing for everybody to realize is what data can accomplish for your business. You’ll be at a significant disadvantage if you don’t understand how analytics might benefit your company. Marketers are becoming more reliant on data as their clients are growing progressively digitized.

To solve this problem, you have to do a lot of research on marketing analytics. There are loads of resources available on the Internet about this topic.

Moreover, many colleges throughout the globe provide courses on the subject, and there are numerous books on Amazon that can get you acquainted with the basics of marketing analytics.

2. Real-Time Reporting

In this fast-paced digital world, you can get a lot of traffic from online platforms and social media. However, the catch is you have to provide rapid interactions and immediate options. As most of the things that are bought online, happen at the spur of the moment. So, if you can’t provide real-time reporting, you might lose to your competitors who can.

To deal with this problem, you can use real-time marketing analytics solutions that can assist you in creating bespoke reports, allowing you to structure your data in the best possible way. You should be able to observe real-time changes in the performance of your marketing campaigns and make changes accordingly.

3. Data Overload

We all know that the marketing department is a bit cluttered, as you can’t pinpoint one successful path. This path can largely vary depending on the time and type of the business. Moreover, this is especially true now that your clients are increasingly tech-savvy and engage with your marketing activities on a daily basis.

There is an easy solution to this problem!

You have to be more diverse with your marketing initiatives. There are lots of testing tools available in the market, which will help to test every possible strategy. This way, you can see for yourself what works best for your company. You’ll be able to cut through the clutter and get rid of products that aren’t profitable for your company.

Role of Advanced Analytics In Your Marketing Journey

Advanced analytics use complex methodologies and tools to unearth amazing insights, generate forecasts, and suggest action plans. It uses advanced procedures such as predictive analysis, futuristic statistical approaches, data mining, and computer learning to identify patterns and linkages and anticipate outcomes in a variety of situations.

To put it simply, it uses more intricate tools that can process heaps of data, and generate valuable results. Let’s see some of the branches of advanced analytics:

1. Data Mining

Data mining is the process of organizing and filtering data in order to uncover possibly lucrative patterns and trends. Most of this is powered by high-end AI and machine learning. To put this in perspective, with traditional analytical tools, you can only focus on around 10 attributes to generate reports. However, using advanced data mining tools, you can work with over 100 attributes, which can give much more clarity over your target demographic.

2. Predictive Analysis

Predictive analytical tools can be referred to as a group of historical experts. As, they analyze every possible historical record available in your database, and predict all the outcomes about your target demographic. Moreover, it takes in a lot of variables, which can give you the best possible predictions. You can also figure out whether a certain product will work or not if you decide to launch it tomorrow.

3. Augmented Analytics

Augmented analytical software, entirely depends on Al and machines to make reports. One of its major strengths is that it can handle very large datasets and provide valuable insights to your company. Moreover, you can customize all your elements and attributes which are important for your business. You can also say that it is an enhanced version of traditional machine learning tools.

These tools are especially valuable for sectors like media, retail, finance, and manufacturing, where you have to consider a huge number of elements, to get useful insights for the future.

What Can You Say About Marketing Attributions?

There’s a customer journey involved, every time your product gets sold. And every customer journey has a lot of moving elements that can change depending on the type of business. Marketing attribution is responsible for analyzing those elements in the customer journey and creating reports about which attributes are working and which are not. This will allow you to compare different sales funnels, giving a better understanding of the interest of your target Demographics.

Marketing attribution can be further classified into two different models. Let’s have look at what these are:-

Single Touch Attribution Model

Signal Touch Attribution also has two different branches:-

First-Touch Attribution

For instance, if a viewer decides to buy your product after interacting with your first advertising campaign, then you can say it is a first touch-attribution.

Last-Touch Attributions

In this case, it only gives preference to the last touchpoint. For instance, if you released four advertisements and a lead converts on the fourth one, then all the credit goes to the fourth touchpoint.

These approaches are not very popular among marketers, as you can’t evaluate your marketing campaigns with a broader perspective.

Multiple TouchPoint Attributions

Unlike the previous method, this focuses on more than one touchpoint. This type of attribution has four branches:-

Linear

Linear attribution tracks each touchpoint a customer interacts with on their way to making a transaction. Each of these encounters is given identical weight, giving the same amount of credit for generating the sale.

U-shaped

U-shaped attribution gives more credit to the first and last touchpoint. To put things in perspective, the first and last touchpoints are given 40 percent weightage each. And the remaining 20 percent is given to the rest of the touchpoints between them.

Time Decay

The Time Decay model gives various amounts of weightage to the touchpoints depending upon their positions. This approach gives more weightage to the touchpoints which are closer to the conversion. This means, there is less weightage to the ones that are used earlier in the process, presuming that the latter had a stronger impact on the transaction.

W-Shaped

This type of model is pretty similar to the U-shaped attribution. But, it considers another touchpoint apart from the first and last one. This is called the opportunity touchpoint. These three touchpoints are given 30 percent weightage each, while the remaining 10 percent is distributed among the others.

Make sure to pick your attribution model, depending on the type of industry you’re in.

How Can Marketing Analytics Improve Digital Customer Experience and Customer Journey?

The customer journey refers to understanding the actions of your target audience, how they interact with your website, or initiatives you should take to improve those experiences. Providing a top-notch digital customer experience will be the key to generating more leads and gaining loyal customers. Let’s see why using analytics can prove to be a boon for improving customer journey:-

1. Performance Analytics

The best part of using analytics in marketing is that you can evaluate your marketing campaigns. You can immediately know what is working best for your company, and what isn’t. This gives a lot of room for improvement, as you try numerous approaches to find an effective one.

Some of the elements that can be evaluated are the number of purchases, click-through rates, number of installs, and much more.

Therefore, if these numbers are low the marketing team can work on their strategies, to improve these overall marketing performance. And every small tweak which is made towards the marketing strategies can be very beneficial in the long run.

2. Omnichannel Marketing

There is fierce competition in the sector of marketing. Therefore, to stay competitive almost all the companies opt for cross-channel marking, to bring the most out of their campaigns. However, there is a catch in this approach. As with different platforms, there will be a lot of fragmented data.

This is where marketing analytics comes into play. Data abstraction and eradication of data silos across different touchpoints can be greatly aided by marketing analytics.

Marketers will be able to design stronger multi-channel communications as a result of this, as well as have a 360-degree picture of the customer experience.

3. Better Retargeting

You can use retargeting to reach out to people who took a sequence of steps but didn’t finish a specific goal. For instance, you can reach out to the people who have selected the items in the cart but haven’t purchased them yet.

Marketing firms can improve their retargeting operations by monitoring which customers walked off and at what stage. Analytics removes all of the guesswork, allowing the marketing team to better execute their campaigns. For a large scale business, it would be better if you can automate this process to some extent.

Marketing analytics does more than just reveal customer demands and interests; it also directs marketers to make the most use of their talents and expertise in order to achieve their own, and thus the business’s, objectives. You can gather a huge amount of data in databases, so it’s high time to learn how to leverage the data to gain profits for your company.

Steps For Making Data-Driven Decisions?

In the recent digital era, marketing approaches have greatly evolved. It’s better to rely on data and analytics, to make marketing decisions instead of just intuitions. Moreover, by using data analysis software, you can appropriately predict the outcomes of your campaign and come up with new and innovative ideas. It will also help you to increase your quality and consistency across all your marketing channels.

Therefore, to help you with this process I have put together some crucial steps that you should take while working with data:-

1. Map Out a Strategy

To make better data-driven decisions, you must first determine how data may assist you in achieving your objectives. Do you want to improve your engagement rate? Is it time to revamp your marketing funnel? Do you want to learn how to target a particular demographic?

Once you’ve decided on a goal, you may begin devising a method to achieve it. Make sure to consider all the indicators that are important for your strategy. After deciding the metrics, enter the types of data you will need, and keep a clean record in your database.

2. Analyzing Your Data

After deciding the type of metrics that must be monitored, you must decide who will be in charge of keeping a record of those. This individual is usually someone who supervises the implementation of your marketing campaigns.

Having said that, if you’re dealing with highly technical data, then you might have to rely on a skilled data scientist who can properly collect and maintain this data. You need to figure, out want this data represents, so it becomes very important to translate the data appropriately.

3. Leveraging the Trends

Marketing necessitates a lot of testing, which may be costly. That’s why coming up with a fresh plan might be intimidating, especially if you already have a few tried-and-true options.

However, appropriately translated data can help you discover new patterns and trends. These trends might appear very suddenly, and can be valid only during a few weeks. You have to quickly adapt your marketing strategies to these trends so that you can take full advantage of these patterns.

For instance, you can keep track of what type of keywords are widely used, or will there be any noteworthy incidents in the near future?

Anything that might draw some attention can be beneficial for your marketing.

How Can Data Visualization Help in Marketing?

Every single day, your mind comes across petabytes of data, and most of it is gathered as visuals. We all know that visual data is processed much faster than in any other format. Since the marketing sector is now heavily relying on data for its growth, marketers generally have a hard time going through heaps of info in their spreadsheets.

This is where Data Visualization can be beneficial. To put it simply, data visualization helps you to represent huge amounts of data in the form of graphs, scatterplots, or charts. This makes it very easy to recognize new patterns.

Let’s go over some of the reasons, why data visualization can be beneficial for your marketing strategies:-

1. Analyzing new patterns

As mentioned previously, you will be able to see new patterns, which you might have missed going through your spreadsheets. This helps you to have a better outlook on your customers, and you can be more accurate in your forecasting reports.

2. Improved Productivity

As a business owner, your primary goal must be to boost your productivity and revenue. Relying on visual representation can play a major role in this part. As you can get an accurate idea of what your data looks like. Moreover, the new changes in your graphs will be clearly visible, which can save you a lot of time in analyzing the data, and you can quickly make well-informed decisions.

3. Better Reporting

The most apparent application of data visualizations is better presentation. The results, which are presented in a variety of graphs and illustrations, can create a greater impact when compared to any traditional approach. Moreover, it’s easier to graph the information when they are presented visually.

In the making, sector communication plays an important role. You can boost the enthusiasm of your teams by presenting visually appealing reports and images. They also have a favorable influence over your clients.

What is Predictive Analysis?

Predictive analysis is a process in which you can analyze the different types of insights using your AI and machine learning software to make a forecast about future behaviors.

This approach takes every historical data into consideration that is recorded in your database. By closely monitoring the purchasing behaviors of your target audience, you can predict what might appeal to them in the future.

When it comes to predictive analytics, there are three important models that you have to consider:-

Cluster Models: These types of algorithms are used to categorize customers based on previous brand interaction, transactions, and demographic information.

Propensity Models: These assess a customer’s probability of converting, how they can respond to an offer or their chances of disengaging.

Recommendations Filtering: This approach analyzes previous purchasing data to see where further marketing opportunities may exist.

How Can You Use Predictive Analysis In the Marketing Department?

Marketers always have a hard time analyzing, as they have heaps of raw data at their disposal. Therefore, predictive analytics software can be ideal for marketers to generate valuable insights that can decide the future of their business. So, let’s see how you can use predictive analysis in your marketing strategies:-

1. Unified Marketing

Marketers require a large amount of past data to forecast future trends. Marketers have to monitor every interaction of their customers from how they are connecting with campaigns and progress through the sales funnel. To properly construct customer identities, you have to unify these data points and get them synced. By centralizing data from industry trends, customer behavior, and client interactions, you can generate appropriate predictions about your future.

2. Marketing Analytical Softwares

You can’t just rely on basic assessment models, as you will have a large amount of data to deal with. Therefore, as a marketer, you will need powerful marketing statistics tools that can condense all of this data into understandable content. And, once you understand this data, it will be easier for you to make decisions depending on the insights.

3. Al and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are expected to play a big part in brand optimization, as they are must-have elements when it comes to omnichannel marketing solutions. These solutions are necessary since they allow marketers to respond to data in real-time, instantly presenting dynamic information. Dynamic costing, computerized sales predictions, automatic content generation, and real-time personalization can all be a reality with Predictive Analysis and machine learning.

The Future Of Marketing Analytics

Given the increased number of virtual platforms, though the firms can reach their customers as well as the opportunity to buy digitally thanks to eCommerce, today’s shoppers have grown to demand more from firms attempting to reach them. Customers now expect to stay engaged with the products, if they like them in the first few uses.

Furthermore, with so many firms attempting to pitch to customers through these channels, retaining them has become very hard for the new businesses.

If the marketers want to cater to the needs of today’s customers, then they have to be more personalized according to their target audience. They need to understand what their customers are looking for, and when they might require their products. The brand of marketing analytics can solve all these concerns very easily. For predictive analysis to AI-generated insights, it has everything a marketer might need to make a successful campaign. So, we all can agree that the future of marketing can’t be imagined without the help of marketing analytics.

Final Thoughts

The sector of marketing analytics is like a vast ocean, which has a lot of tools and features. So, if you are new to marketing analytics, it will take some time to get yourself comfortable with its features. Make sure to test the waters before making any marketing strategies.

If you want to test different marketing tools, make sure to check out this list of some of the best marketing tools you can get on the Internet.

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