Introduction to Marketing Analytics For Dummies
Marketing Analytics For Dummies – Analytics is one of those words, if used correctly in business it leads to great success. Most of us would have heard the word “analytics” but we often relate it to web analytics tools like Google Analytics and others.
Web analytics gives you detailed knowledge about the technical performance of your site but marketers need much more information to know the performance of their marketing campaign which web analytics will not provide.
So What exactly makes marketing analytics different from web analytics?
- Web analytics measures things which the web master takes into account whereas Marketing analytics measures business metrics like traffic, leads and sales
- Web analytics includes data only from your website whereas Marketing analytics includes data from various sources like social media
- Web analytics produces reports which mainly focuses on one factor – Page views whereas Marketing analytics is usually people-centric
Marketing Analytics lets the marketing people to find out the true ROI of their marketing activities and they can also find out which marketing channel and marketing mix needs to be improved to achieve their business goals. Sounds pretty good.
What is Marketing Analytics?
It is the measurement and optimization of the marketing activities to make the investment in marketing as effective as possible. It evaluates the success of marketing initiatives and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, it tells you how your marketing Analytics programs are really performing.
The concept of Marketing Analytics seems simple but marketers need to spend hours together to achieve the desired outcome of their efforts.
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Marketing Analytics gathers data from all the marketing channels and consolidates it into a general marketing view. This marketing view will help you know about the analytical results of your marketing campaigns. This view will also help you in deciding about the further actions to make your marketing more effective.
It goes beyond the on-site indicators and depends on offsite metrics and offsite works. It takes all the things into consideration for measurement of your marketing success.
What you can do with marketing analytics?
Marketing analytics will help you to improve the marketing performance on an individual as well as an overall channel basis. It will help you to answer few marketing analytics questions which are listed below
- How is your marketing initiatives performing today?
- Are the marketing resources allocated properly?
- Is the investment made to the right channel?
- What should you do to improve them?
- What marketing activities do your competitors follow?
- Where do you need to invest more time and money?
- What are the channels that you are not using for marketing?
- Which channel returns the most feedback?
- Which channel is limited by the resources?
- What marketing strategies are experiencing stable growth?
- What is the next step to take ?
- What should be prioritized for the investments ?
Marketing analytics will help you do the following things
- Identify which topic to blog about
- Refine your SEO strategy
- Decide where to spend your time
- Determine the email frequency
- Decide what type of contents to use
- Segment the email communications
- Improve your landing pages
- Focus on the channels that works best for your business
Develop solutions to business problems effectively. Learn to define, analyze and document business requirements. Investigate business activities to make them more efficient.
What Marketing Analytics can do for you?
What if web analytics are not enough to meet your needs?
Marketing analytics will help you when web analytics fails to help you. Marketing analytics will help you with the following things
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Integrate with different marketing channels
Marketing analytics will help you to have a direct control over all the marketing channels used by you for marketing. You will be able to know the performance of each individual channel. It will help you to prepare the analytics report easily by combining the performance of all the marketing channels.
For example, if you have posted an ad to create leads marketing analytics will help you to know not only how many people clicked on your ads but it will also let you know how many of the visitors are converted into leads. You can also know the effectiveness of the ads with respect to other marketing activities.
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People Centric Data
As we already saw the main difference between web analytics and marketing analytics is that web analytics focuses on page views and marketing analytics focuses on the person. This feature of marketing analytics will help you to know about individual prospects and leads towards different marketing channels and initiatives. It will let you know
- From where an individual lead has come to your site?
- Is the lead converted into sales?
- Is the lead active on your site?
- Are they subscribed to your mails and click on your mails?
- Do they read your blog?
The questions to all these answers will provide you with valuable information to generate more leads through effective marketing campaigns. It will also help you to understand the trends among the people and which marketing technique will work out the best and at which stage. It will make it possible to work out effective lead management.
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Closed Loop Data
The important attraction of Marketing analytics is its ability to relate marketing activities to sales.
How do you know how many of your leads are being converted into customers and derive profit to your business ?
Closed loop marketing analytics will help you to know which marketing channel drives more sales and profit to your business. Marketing analytics can be joined with CRM platforms
Why Marketing Analytics is important?
As business expands into new categories new technologies are introduced to improve the business. There is no doubt that the development of better analytical tools has helped the business to become leaders in their field.
Due to the increasing customer expectations and advancement of technologies, marketers face a challenging environment.
Web analytics alone will not help the marketers to face the challenge. Here comes the need for Marketing analytics.
Many marketers underestimate the power of marketing analytics. This is because of the lack of cohesion. The different marketing analytics platform will let the marketers gain deeper insight about their marketing performance and help them make sound decisions. Great marketers will use it to adapt, improve and modify their marketing activities.
Your marketing activities should not just prove your boss that it is good but it should also make you feel that it is worth all the time and money spent on it.
Today’s marketing goes beyond your website. Even if you spend hours together in web analytics tool you will not have a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing activities are doing.
It helps the marketers to take decisions after considering all the channels of marketing. Such decisions will be effective and efficient.
It helps you to see how all the marketing activities are carried out and will let you know where the investment has to be made to make the business move forward.
It returns more cost than what you invested in it. Most of the companies now use Marketing Analytics. It will lead to better lead nurturing and management which in turn leads to more profitability.
How to get started with Marketing Analytics?
Starts where every other thing starts in your business. Before starting with it you should do some basic research and follow these guidelines.
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How is the performance of your marketing activities?
Here you need to pay attention to the current marketing efforts carried out for your business. Find out how it is performing now. Web analytics focuses only on your site and gives you a narrow view whereas it gives a wide angle view. It gives you onsite as well as offsite reports
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Use a balanced analytic technique
Always use an analytic technique that gives you a report about the past, helps you to analyze the present and predict and decide about the future.
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What is your competitors main focus? Where do they invest?
It feels that competitive analysis is more important which should be done constantly to be aware of the trend in the market. You should observe their marketing pattern and find out what marketing activities do they perform? where do they invest more time and resources? what channel is considered more important by them ? are they investing in content marketing?
This competitive research will help you know where you are. Based on this you can make a plan for your marketing strategy and succeed in it.
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Know your analytic capabilities
Organizations have different analytic capabilities based on their marketing goals. It’s an important step to access your analytic capabilities to know where you are and how much gap should be filled in to achieve your goals. By knowing this you can plan and develop a strategy to reach your goals.
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How does your marketing activity perform in the long term?
Tracking the success of your marketing effort is more important to know how far you have attained the goal. While tracking there are many things that are to be considered more important. You should know about your short term gains or losses as well as your long term gains or losses.
It will focus on the overall performance of the marketing activities providing you details about the channels that worked out best for the long run and channels which worked out best only for a short period of time. Based on this you can take better decisions about where to invest more time and resources
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Take actions on your reports
Provides you all the information related to your marketing activities. Unless you take necessary actions against such information there is of no real value to your marketing analytics strategy.
Implement a constant process of testing and learning and react on what you learn. This will help you improve the overall marketing performance of your business.
Mistakes that marketers do with Marketing Analytics
Here are some of the mistakes marketers do with analytics.
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Set it and forget it attitude
After knowing about this great term many marketers start following it. They start collecting data but then they never get back to know what is happening and how things are going. It expects more interaction from the part of the marketers. To make it successful you should frequently review the limits on the process based on your decisions.
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It’s not a CMO’s job alone
Many people think that the marketing program is the sole responsibility of CMO. But in reality each and every marketer is responsible for the marketing activities. They should actively get involved and make a plan about what should be done next.
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Failing to learn about the gains and losses
An organization should make the marketing analytics a part of the team’s culture and should share the things regularly. You should inform the members about the gains and losses achieved through marketing analytics. Instead of talking in general about marketing analytics tell them about specific campaigns which derived more leads to your business, content which worked out best for your marketing campaign and efforts.
Powerful tools of Marketing Analytics
Below are some of the powerful tools described.
- Measuring the effectiveness of your website – The web analytics come into the scene in this section
- Measuring the impact of your content marketing – This will help you to know what type of contents are more attractive to the audience and how much it could contribute to the business
- Marketing ROI planning – Plan your reports. Marketing evolution is an example where marketers can create ROI plans
- Predictive lead scoring and conversion rates – It is a predictive modelling tool. this helps the marketers to assess and create contents that will bring more revenue to the business. Lattice engine is an example.
Conclusion
In today’s world analytics is far ahead than the traditional marketing activity. Important factor for marketing these days. So long web analytics was dominating the analytics world. Now it is more crucial for a successful marketing program but it does not mean that it replaces web analytics. It also serves as the top measurement tool for evaluating marketing campaign effectiveness.
If you wish to learn depth do try our Marketing Analytics Bundle.
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