However, marketing alone is like is not enough? It is like ignoring Charter Internet offers and phone deals and only going for cable plans. You are missing the best part. Hence, analytics also needs to be injected into the marketing strategy. Marketing analytics is all about forecasting results and measuring the progress of your marketing activities. If you are a small business, this guide takes you the depth of marketing analytics and its importance in 2020 (the digital era).
What is Marketing Analytics?
It refers to the process of measuring and analyzing data as well as its impact on your marketing strategies. This data is also used for improving ROI and identifying other areas of improvement. The marketing department relies on marketing analytics the most. It uses certain metrics for determining the results of the marketing efforts. Without analytics, it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
These are some of the questions marketing analytics answers:
- How are marketing initiatives performing?
- How to improve marketing efforts?
- What marketing channels to focus on and what not?
- How do the current marketing efforts compare to that of competitors?
Why Business Need Marketing Analytics?
In order to make your marketers more efficient, start using analytics. It can actually keep your marketing budget from wasting. If you want to know how, check out some of the benefits of marketing analytics:
Get Past Insights
Marketing analytics also offers insight into what happened in the past. It’s not just about the future. All marketers want to avoid the mistakes of the past. Analytics is one smooth way of identifying them.
Descriptive analysis and customer relationship management combined with the marketing tech stack provide all information about the past. It also answers specific questions. For instance, what caused the new launch to fail and how can it be avoided in the future.
Measure Current Campaigns
Analytics also offers detailed insights into current marketing efforts. It gives you a real-time analysis of all your marketing efforts. You will know which campaigns are driving leads, which need to be improved, track the status of leads, and so much more.
Make Future Predictions
Predictive analysis is one of the best parts of marketing analytics. Regression analysis, collaborative filtering, along with clustering are some of the methods used in predictive modeling. All these tools let you anticipate consumer behavior.
With this information, marketers execute certain marketing tactics to retain customers. Analytics let you focus on the future instead of the rearview strategy. With machine learning and statistical algorithm, you are able to predict future outcomes.
KPI Metrics in Tracking Marketing Efforts
There is a whole range of important KPIs that can be used in marketing analytics to improve the effectiveness of the campaign. These are the key ones:
Sales Revenue
The sales revenue needs to exceed the expenses of the marketing campaign.
CPC
Determine the CPC (cost per conversion). Find out how many conversions do each marketing effort is generating. If this has brought you leads, what is the value of these leads? The CPC report will give you all such details.
Conversion Rate
If you have a landing page on your website, measure its conversion rate. How many visitors landed on the page? Also, find out how many of them actually signed up.
Social Media Reach
Figure out how much traffic are you getting from each social media page (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, as well as LinkedIn). Knowing which social network is effective lets you optimize your social media marketing strategy as well as saves time.
Getting Started With Analytics
First things first, to get started, you must first know what you want to track and where to track it. Most email marketing firms stick to revenue, leads, CPC, and other metrics mentioned above. This is just the beginning, you can track so much more.
Other items that a business can track to get a bigger picture of the marketing efforts include:
- Cost per lead
- Organic traffic
- Social media management
- Inbound marketing ROI
Once you are clear what to track, look into the dashboards of your campaigns to identify the right channels, to begin with. Not to forget, you can’t start without marketing analytics software. The tools used can make a big difference in reaching your goals. How, you ask? Great tools show a thorough analysis.
Conclusion
Marketing analytics is for businesses of all sizes because everyone’s relying on some sort of marketing plan. Building analytics empowers your sales as well as marketing teams. Measuring each one of your marketing investments is highly fruitful. In case you are struggling to increase your ROI, start using analytics.
If you are not running analytics, you are missing out on a world of opportunities to grow your bottom line. Even if you run a blog that talks about TV choice deals, I would say analytics is for you too. After all, you deserve to know what type of visitors read your blog posts.