Digital Marketing Analytics

What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is the process of collecting data across all the channels, analysing it to obtain actionable insights that maximize return on investment. By measuring, analysing, and managing performance, marketing analytics help sales and marketing strategies to be as cost-effective and successful as possible.

Marketing analytics are used to track and analyse performance data, leading indicator metrics, and diagnostic metrics to provide effective solutions and strategies to businesses to improve growth. Irrespective of the size and strength of the business, by curating and implementing the right marketing metrics and analytics, trends and customer preferences can be tracked to find actionable insights and revenue can be maximised.

What problems does Marketing Analytics solve?

• Seemingly unrelated data-

Simply tracking customer engagement and collecting data that seems unrelated will not help you optimize either sales or marketing strategies. The data needs to be analysed to understand customer behavior, and how that impacts the bottom-line. It is important to understand the customer persona to be able to cater to its needs. Every business has its unique goals that it aims to achieve. Improving sales and revenue is a big part of it, but there are other objectives as well that drive a company towards success. The analytics need to be set up in accordance with all the goals. There needs to be a plan, a blueprint according to which the data needs to be compiled so that actionable insights can be analysed out of it. 

• Unification of data-

It is important to gather as much data as possible. It is equally important to be able to connect the data, to unify it into an actionable plan. Marketing analytics can help do just that, so that less time is spent sifting through the mountains of data and more time is spent acting on the insights that can be obtained from it. 

• Uncertain impact on revenue and profit-

Tracking the impact of marketing campaigns across the different channels is important in understanding what the return on investment is. Marketing Analytics when curated and placed effectively do more than just generate reports on revenue and profit. Analysis of the data helps obtain insights based on which decisions can be made to actually boost revenue and sales. 

• Metrics that don’t connect to actions-

Metrics that generate actionable insights are never unilateral or reporting on a single campaign. They are always, or should always be cross-sectional and tracking the incremental contributions of marketing campaigns across all the channels. That is a vast amount of data, but it is necessary to track and understand each touch point along the customer journey. Marketing Analytics helps simplify the data into actions which are designed to drive growth and profitable outcomes.

• Unsustainability or Struggles with forecasting-

Marketing Analytics when incorporated into the early stages of a company not only helps understand customer journeys and revenue cycles better, they also help boost future revenue and marketing strategies. By analysing the data across the different channels, understanding customer journey, marketing analytics help forecast and generate new leads. It helps keep the company visible, consistent, and thriving. By tracking the various touch points, it helps understand the viable prospects and actionable insights better to help the company keep scaling through each stage of its success.

Why Marketing Analytics matters?

• Numbers Matter

Statistics and numbers are relevant, concrete, and more significantly, persuasive. How do you analyse whether a marketing strategy has been successful or not across a particular channel? Whether revenue has improved after a google ad has been used? Whether social media interaction has improved after a series of posts? Only by analysing the data points can the actual impact be calculated. 

Marketing Analytics helps you understand what is working and what isn’t, and more importantly, why. Understanding the reasons behind the results helps you optimize it and in the process save money by recognising the strategies that aren’t achieving their goals.

• Data translates to Information

Collecting data is only half of what is necessary. If there isn’t a team of professional marketing analysts who can understand it and obtain actionable insights from it, the data does nothing, or nothing useful. If misunderstood or misused, the marketing strategies would yield little to no results. 

For the data to translate into information, more importantly, useful and actionable information it needs to be processed by the relevant data analysis. Marketing analysis lets you make decisions that are backed by facts so that you don’t have to rely on a hunch of what the collected data might mean.

• Compare and Contrast

Marketing analytics help you compare and contrast the performance of the different channels from the data obtained. Moreover, it helps you compare the results of revenue and sales against what you might have estimated from specific marketing strategies. Marketing analytics also helps compare the results of a particular marketing strategy across different demographics (age, gender, location, etc.,). By honing in the best strategy for a different demographic, the marketing efforts can be streamlined to be their most effective.

• Goals drive Success

Whether it is increasing traffic on your company’s website or improving sales and revenue. Whether it is engaging customers on social media or promoting a particular product/service. Every business has goals and objectives, and areas that it needs to optimize to achieve those goals. Marketing analysis can help identify and quantify the goals precisely, and help form concrete plans to achieve them. Moreover, marketing analysis helps track progress so that you can identify problems and opportunities.

Marketing analysis identifies where you should be investing time, energy, and money and the right combination of marketing tools. By gathering high-quality data and analysing it for useful information it provides actionable insights that drive progress.