Marketing is difficult, marketers lookout for new audiences, engage them with innovative ideas & experiment with new concepts.
All this keeping in mind to validate their budgets and defend their efforts from the assault of usually unhappy sales team.
The beauty of doing marketing today is with the help of data analytics and tools that can provide insightful results to help you make rational decisions. You can use marketing analytics tool to solve your most annoying marketing challenges.
Production of so much data makes marketing analytics difficult for manual analysis. Marketers usually have traffic data, conversion data, lead data, email marketing data, social media data, and much more. Deciding on what data to pull, and when, is the tricky part.
Although no two organizations are the same, often they face similar problems, and uncertain of how to use data to help them in their decision-making process.
Why Marketing Analytics
1. Tackle Uncertainty
The success of any business depends on its capacity to deal with the indefinite external environment. The rapidly changing economies and unstable customer preferences require organizations to prepare for Uncertainty.
Cutting-edge marketing analytics tools intake data in the form of inputs and analyze the past results to discover predictable outcomes of an uncertain situation.
2. Retain Existing Customers
Research suggests that 70% of the customers don’t buy again from the companies who satisfied them initially. The significance of selling to existing customers cannot be highlighted enough in a business set up.
The focus is on acquiring new clients for the survival of the firm. Though, customer retention and repurchase are critical for quicker and expectable revenue growth.
3. Marketing to new customers
The rapidly increasing competition has led marketers to think of newer ways to reach the target customers. The right marketing analytics tool helps analyze present and past to suggest alterations.
It enables your sales and marketing teams to act rapidly and conclusively. This not only saves your marketing budget but also increases the return on marketing investments.
Scope of Marketing Analytics
1. Descriptive- What happened in the past
- Amount in marketing
- Value of pipeline contribution
- Channel-wise ROI
- Sales Funnel Analysis
2. Predictive- What could happen
- Number of active conversations
- Social media sentiment score
- Forecast of leads that will convert into customers
3. Prescriptive- What should be done
- Restructuring of marketing budget
- Marketing mix optimization
- Optimization of social media scheduling
Benefits of Marketing Analytics
- Optimize your lead generation
- Continuously measure and improve close rates
- Learn from real customer feedback
- Gain a full view of customers across channels
- Become more proactive and effective
- Personalize your marketing and customer engagements
- Sharpen social media strategies
- Engage your customers in real-time
- Visualize success across the enterprise
- Treat data as a strategic asset
When to Invest in Marketing Analytics
1. When you are experiencing poor conversion rate
In case you are completely lost what to do to prevent leakage at various stages of your sales funnel, don’t worry, you are not alone. Marketers are always facing this problem without knowing the solution to it.
The solution to it is to enter closed-loop analytics. Dividing your funnel to understand what’s coming in at the top and the result at each stage along the way will help you recognize the ‘leakiest’ fragments of the funnel.
If you have huge website traffic but only 1% of it converts into a lead, and leads close at a 50% rate, you should know that you need to work on the top of the funnel and investigate why your propositions aren’t working out or if you’re attracting the wrong traffic to your website.
Now that is a very common scenario as most funnels are complex. But to do this, you need marketing analytics to be integrated with your CRM so you can map that funnel all the way to the end.
2. When you want engaging content
Most of the old-school marketers came up with content ideas based on their gut feeling. If not, they relied on costly and time-consuming focus groups. But today even the smallest piece of content must be created basis the value it holds in terms of customer engagement.
The use of marketing analytics tools for research about keyword & website traffic helps marketers what is really driving behavior. Search and analytics cannot be spared before reaching your prospects and customers, but in order to get a lot more efficient and targeted, you can use keyword analytics.
Before you think of creating your next eBook, Blog, or even email campaign, be sure to research your traffic-driving keywords.
It will give you the insights to make you create more interesting content that focuses on the keywords and topics your prospects like.
3. When you want to make the most of your social media
If not for marketing analytics, marketers surely come up with a ballpark estimate of their social media results.
Not only can marketers make use of traffic analytics to demonstrate the volume of traffic visiting their website from social channels, but if they use integrated marketing tools, they can also track leads and business generated from a particular social channel like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Tracking money generated from social media campaigns makes it a lot easier to capitalize on the best social media channels for your organization and spend less the ones that aren’t generating good results.
You can also use customized URLs, UTM codes, and specific landing pages for your social campaigns to track their results.
4. When you are in a Sales v/s Marketing war
What happens when sales and marketing teams blame each other when the targets are missed?
The sales team always has a problem with the quality of leads provided by the marketing department; and similarly, the marketing team complains about speed and prioritization of picking up leads by the sales team. The battle has no end until data comes to rescue.
With the oncoming of marketing analytics, there is less room for this type of conflict as the data clears the fog and depicts the real picture.
Marketing analytics suffice to create and maintaining a service level agreement between the sales and marketing teams and helps analyze the quality of leads generated (with lead scoring) and the timeline & order in which they were touched by the sales team.
What used to be a knock-down battle, has now become a collective business discussion about fine-tuning lead criteria and optimizing sales processes to meet the organizational goals.
The right kind of marketing analytics tool presents an all-inclusive picture of your marketing efforts, supports, and empowers teams to make decisions that are more likely to do well.
It helps to solve critical business issues using data and statistics which would otherwise be settled based on gut feelings of a few influential individuals in the organization.
It finally helps consumers as well as organizations by enabling them to find out product improvements that add more value to the consumers.
Must Read:
Marketing Analytics – Five Trends To Watch Out For
Translating Google Analytics into Actionable Insights
How Data Analytics can be a Game Changer: A Netflix Case Study
