Marketing in the digital age is moving quickly. Companies from all industries are taking advantage of this boom by leveraging on what is perhaps the most precious resource of modern commerce—data.
Marketing analytics is the way companies use this data to their advantage.
What Is the Definition of Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is when data is collected from marketing platforms to create complex models to visualize and understand user behavior. Businesses that use marketing analytics can ensure the money they allocate for advertising gets the highest return on investment (ROI) and that all of their marketing efforts remain lean.
How Is Marketing Analytics Different from Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the overall process of using digital platforms to advertise a product, service, or company. Digital marketers use marketing analytics to make digital marketing efforts more efficient and more profitable.
Why Is Marketing Analytics Important?
Executives from the biggest companies in the world all agree that data is fueling the future of marketing. With proper insight and implementation of marketing analytics, you no longer have to rely on expensive trial and error with your advertising campaigns because the data you retrieve will help you continuously optimize your campaigns for higher returns.
That means lower marketing costs, more valuable customers and more feasible and effective growth and scaling plans.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing Analytics?
For a more concrete idea of how powerful marketing analytics is, here are a few of the benefits of implementing marketing analysis into an organization’s promotional strategy.
Get to Know Your Audience
With marketing analytics, you can target the audience to which you intend to advertise through a process called behavioral segmentation.
This means that you will understand what your customer’s purchase patterns are, what products they are most likely to buy, and what types of ads they click on the most. This is beneficial to your business.
Not only will you be able to personalize your company’s advertising campaigns to suit specific target audiences, but you can use this information to improve your efforts continuously.
Identify Trends
You can use marketing analytics to identify various trends within your industry, especially in e-commerce. The volume of consumers who have taken your shopping efforts online has grown exponentially so the scope of e-commerce is continuously shifting. But there are clear patterns that unveil themselves by analyzing your marketing data.
For example, one trend that can be identified is whether buyers tend to go to specialized websites during the holidays or more prominent and more general platforms like Amazon or eBay.
Forecast Future Results
By looking at the marketing analytics patterns of previous marketing campaigns, you can more easily predict the outcomes of your future marketing campaigns.
Measure KPIs
Marketing analytics is a way to determine whether or not a company achieves its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
When you run marketing campaigns, for example, one of the things you pay attention to is your conversion rate. A conversion rate is a desired action taken by the customer or user that is influenced by marketing efforts.
With marketing analytics, you can tell if your marketing efforts are working because the associated conversion rate will either rise or fall compared to the previous month.
Optimize Campaigns
One word that can be used to describe the goals of marketing analytics would be ‘refinement.’ In the past, companies relied on more traditional methods to make sure their marketing efforts were working.
Now, you do not need to resort to those methods as frequently because you have a wealth of data to use to optimize your campaigns daily.
How Can I Make Sure My Marketing Analytics Effort Is a Success?
As powerful as marketing analytics are, a company needs to actively make sure that its processes are well-defined and it uses best practices to make sure its analytics are effective. Here are some of those best practices.
Use Multiple Processes
You should rely on multiple processes like conversion rate optimization and product positioning.
Product positioning is what consumers think about a particular brand. By using the data obtained through marketing analytics, you can make sure that your consumers know the value of your products and what makes your products stand out from your competitors.
Product positioning is the best way to highlight a unique selling point.
Optimize Workflows
You can use marketing analytics not only to optimize advertising campaigns but to optimize workflows as well. This means that your company’s efforts will be a lot leaner, and your company will have more apparent objectives and a more well-defined process to achieve these objectives.
An example of this is social media content creation. With marketing analytics, companies can eliminate the guesswork of which pieces of content are valued by their target audience, which ones get the most engagement, and which draw the most traffic to the company’s landing pages.
You can then focus your efforts on the pieces of content most likely to be successful as well as creating more content that your audience loves.
Make Changes Based on Your Findings
You should use the information you obtain to create better success and to mitigate future failures.
An example of this would be an e-commerce fashion brand adjusting to the information obtained for a particular clothing color during winter.
After analyzing their data, the retailer found that specific colors were not popular among its buyers. Based on this information, it didn’t include this clothing color in the following winter line to prevent low conversions.
Predict Customer Lifetime Value
Another important metric that a company should obtain about its customers is something called Customer Lifetime Value. Customer Lifetime Value is the amount of money that a specific customer will likely spend at their business over their entire relationship.
Predicting Customer Lifetime Value can provide you with an indication of how your efforts influence your relationship with your customers. With marketing analytics, you’ll receive a clearer picture of your Customer Lifetime Values and get better ideas on improving these values.
A very powerful aspect of Marketing Analytics is that you have the tools to predict how specific metrics will fare for the next few weeks and well into the future.
Conclusion
Data is now one of the most influential factors in marketing.
Marketing analytics is a way of measuring your company’s marketing efforts. Greater insight leads to better profits and a more robust brand image. The information is readily available—marketing analytics is simply a way to give this information structure to visualize what needs to be done and take the appropriate action.
If you represent your organization and want to know how you can look deeper into your marketing analytics — Kissmetrics is a great way to start.
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