Marketing analytics is the process of tracking, measuring and analyzing data to inform marketing strategy. Ultimately, this helps marketers make more informed decisions that lead to better ROI.
Using analytics can help identify red flags in marketing campaigns before they cause significant loss or risk. Some of the key benefits are:.
Identifying Weak Spots in Your Marketing
No marketing campaign is perfect, and it’s important to identify any areas where your efforts could be improved. Marketing analytics can help with this by analyzing the data and identifying any trends or issues that might need to be addressed. For example, if you notice that your email campaigns aren’t performing well, the analytics may reveal that you need to change your approach by sending more relevant content or improving your list segmentation.
Having a strong marketing analytics strategy can also help you align your team around a data-driven approach to marketing. However, if you’re not using a marketing analytics tool that can be easily understood by your team, it can be easy to lose sight of your goals and begin making decisions based on hunches instead of data.
Marketing analytics tools are essential for ensuring that your marketing campaigns are performing optimally, but it’s important to remember that these tools are only as effective as the people who use them. It’s recommended to create a marketing analytics team that includes members from every department and a data analyst who can lead the team.
With the right marketing analytics platform, you can collect and analyze data from all of your marketing channels to improve your campaigns. Then, you can use this information to optimize your online strategies and connect with customers at the moment they’re ready to buy.
Getting a Better Return on Investment (ROI)
Marketing analytics enables marketers to measure, track and optimize marketing campaigns. This makes it easier to credit marketing initiatives for revenue growth on a campaign-by-campaign basis and make decisions on how to spend each dollar.
Marketing budgets can be tough to justify. Using data-backed analytics to show the impact that marketing has on your bottom line can help make the case to executives for increasing investment.
When you have an in-depth understanding of how different marketing strategies are performing, it’s easy to identify those that are providing the best return on investment and to allocate more resources to those initiatives going forward. This allows you to reduce your cost per customer acquisition and increase the number of customers that you can retain and grow.
It’s not uncommon for those who hold the purse strings at a company to not fully understand or even know about what is happening in the marketing department. Having an easy-to-read report on marketing performance each month can give you the guardrails you need to avoid making mistakes with the marketing budget that could have negative financial implications.
In addition, marketing analytics can also save you money by delivering a more streamlined process for managing, analyzing and leveraging consumer data. This allows you to focus on what really matters in a business: delivering value and creating a loyal following.
Increasing Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty and retention are vital to growing your business. In fact, according to Bain & Company, loyal customers bring in 25% more revenue than first-time buyers.
Marketing analytics uses predictive modeling and artificial intelligence to analyze consumer data to identify trends, predict future behavior, and optimize the return on investment of your ad campaigns. It also provides a streamlined process for collecting, analyzing, and leveraging consumer data so that marketers can focus on their marketing strategies instead of spending time and resources managing multiple processes and tools to manage and report on consumer data.
One example of how marketing analytics is helping increase customer loyalty is by using predictive models to create targeted product recommendation offers. For instance, if your consumers have previously purchased accounting software from you, the program could recommend that they purchase an on-demand webinar for small businesses about best practices for payroll taxes.
Similarly, a tiered loyalty program is an effective way to nurture customer relationships by providing customers with special rewards and privileges for their repeated business. For instance, Microsoft Rewards enables customers to redeem points for charitable donations to organizations such as Girls Who Code, Special Olympics, and the Nature Conservancy. Creating accurate customer personas is key to this type of personalized marketing, and predictive analytics tools can help you do just that.
Increasing Sales
By using marketing analytics to better understand consumers and improve the performance of your products and services, you can increase sales and boost your bottom line. The analytics process uses maths and predictive modelling to reveal insights from consumer data, giving you the knowledge you need to optimise how your product or service is positioned in the market, increasing customer engagement and driving up revenue.
Taking a proactive approach to analytics can also help you identify weaknesses in your current marketing strategies. You can then change those strategies to get more out of your marketing spend. By doing this, you can grow your ecommerce business and attract more customers.
For example, if you use marketing analytics to determine that you’re losing a lot of money on your paid digital ads, you can then change your advertising budget. You might also discover that you’re getting more conversions from your trade shows than from your webinars, so you could focus on improving the performance of your top-of-funnel marketing activities.
In order to perform marketing analytics, you’ll need a business intelligence tool. This allows you to collect data from all your marketing channels and then analyze it in order to spot patterns. The tools are powerful and intuitive, allowing you to get a complete picture of the performance of your marketing efforts.