Today’s marketers and CMOs are facing unprecedented pressures to demonstrate in objective and empirical ways how the marketing investments are impacting the business. At the same time, marketers need to extract learnings about their customers and prospects to inform future marketing strategies. Fortunately, we are in the golden age of data, where every organization has access to an abundance of data that can help them with these responsibilities.
The opportunity is there; the key, however, is how marketers collect, measure, analyze, and leverage data to achieve their desired outcomes. Marketing Analytics is an approach that enables marketers to gain insights that drive results.
What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, and analyzing data to determine the effectiveness of different marketing activities. It involves technology, data management, reporting, and analysts with knowledge of the business, sound analytical approaches, curiosity, and the ability to identify opportunities.
Effective marketing analytics captures the data from all of your marketing channels and unifies them into one area for reporting and analysis. Bringing disparate data into one area facilitates analysis, comparing your marketing channels, messages, and audiences based on key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. Marketing Analytics can use advanced analytics or data science techniques to uncover insights based on tracked behaviors or appended data. These insights can inform areas like targeting, messaging, and product offering. The data science techniques can also help with stitching user-level data to measure and quantify the value of end to end interactions, identifying under-marketed high-value audiences, etc. It is also important to note that marketing analytics includes test design, setup, measurement, and analysis to help answer critical business or marketing questions.
What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Analytics?
With the unprecedented amount of data and marketing opportunities available to marketers today, now more than ever, marketers cannot rely on intuition alone to make the right decisions, especially given the requirement to drive revenue growth. So with more options, and the mandate from C-suite to demonstrate a return on marketing spend, marketers must partner and lean on marketing analytics to measure and monitor efforts, link the data to business outcomes or revenue, and communicate to executives how the campaigns drove business value. In short, when done correctly, marketing analytics can help link marketing efforts to business outcomes, provide the organization audience insights, which inform the development of more relevant experiences to the right audience, which in combination leads to business growth.
Are You Doing It Right?
It depends on what you are trying to get out of it. We believe, like everything, there is a spectrum in the marketing analytics world. Below are some examples of what falls within the spectrum.
Novice:
- Heavily relying on their media vendors/publishers reports to make decisions and measure without the ability to look at all channels in a holistic way
- Perhaps have simple reporting dashboards with limited insights
- Limited ability to tie marketing to business outcomes
Intermediate:
- Unified measurement and reporting with common KPIs linked to business outcomes.
- Analytics that tell you which programs or efforts worked and why
- Monitoring trends and benchmarks over time
Advanced:
- Dynamic dashboards with consistently updated data
- Understanding the ROI of each campaign or program with confidence in the attribution approach
- Forecasting results and predicting outcomes based on multiple factors to help with scenario planning or in-market optimizations using advanced analysis or machine learning
- Insights on consumers and identifying new target audiences and opportunities
- Have multiple tests in the market to gain more insights to power future decisions and strategy
The significant benefits of marketing analytics are that it helps organizations objectively assess, learn, compare, and make data-informed decisions which if done right and consistently, maximize outcomes.
Regardless of where you are today in the marketing analytics spectrum, the key is to address it, to increase relevance with your customers to keep and grow your business.
Where To Start
Start by engaging your marketing analytics teams, your different stakeholders, and agree on what you want to be able to get out of marketing analytics. Alignment on requirements and goals is a requirement for effective solution building. Then partner to collectively commit and do your respective parts to achieve those goals.
If you want to improve your marketing analytics and need help, please contact us to determine your needs.
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