Boost Your Business by Leveraging Marketing Analytics

As a Digital marketer I have always believed that marketing should always be a blend of both traditional and digital marketing to build a strong brand. I will keep the bit about traditional marketing for later and talk about digital marketing where data is a key differentiator. Data provides the edge to businesses in today’s competitive market.

Digital marketing specifically provides the means and methods to track the metrics and now traditional marketing activities can also be tracked and measured. Unlike earlier times when marketing efforts could not be tracked, we have the best tools now to track every activity in marketing. We have a wide range of tools for marketing analytics that give us a broad view of overall performance.

What is marketing analytics?

We knowthatmarketing helps you to communicate, create and deliver offerings that provide value to the customer. Marketing analytics is about monitoring your marketing campaign and its outcome. It involves collecting data that can be studied and analyzed to track your marketing spend, time and efforts to examine whether it is utilized in the right way.

In marketing analytics you get an insight of your marketing performance including customer preferences, trends, demographics, interest and more. With this understanding you can gain the capability to plan and secure the ROI (return of investment) in the best possible way. You can also analyze metrics to measure your offline marketing campaigns while several other tools give you analytical reports of unparalleled depth and detail.

There are a few specific analytics tools that I would like to bring in at this point.

• Content analytics tools keep you updated and informed about the latest industry content standards and trends so that you can create the content for your business appropriately and effectively.

• SEO analytics tools help you search the best keywords for your website page or your search marketing campaign based on the volume of search every month for a particular keyword. It gives you a broad idea about the keyword you should use more often to be more effective in the context of search engines. The best part is that you can spy on your competitors about the keywords they are using and how they interact with their customer. Competitor analysis will help you in identifying the competitor’s weakness and strengths which you can use to improve your company’s service and products.

• Web analytics can track the action, behaviors, and geographic characteristic aspects of the visitors on your website pages. It also gathers quantitative data for your website or app –like average time on your webpage, bounce rate, page views, site speed, unique user, recurring users, etc.     

• Social media analytics tools help marketers find out influencers and other relevant members of the industry to start developing relationships. The tool tracks the metrics like clicks, number of comments and engagements, etc.

• Visual behavior analytics helps you to understand how your website users interact with your webpages. With this tool you can improve your website usability and performance.  

Marketing analytic tools also allow you to drill down to a specific narrow area of your business that is important and one that you want to focus on. Analytics gives you the power to design your marketing strategy but during my 20 years of experience, I saw only corporates or a few startups who are keen to use this tool to understand and explore the potential of marketing. SMEs forgo these insights as they don’t know how to track or their budget doesn’t permit them to hire or outsource a digital agency to do this task.

Why Marketing Analytics is Important   

If you ask questions about your product or service to your customers and if they all give you an answer which will please you, then will there be a chance to improve your business? Not really! Your approach toward your business will be the same as before since you would think and believe that your customers are happy and that there is no need for any change in your business approach. Consider an example of telephonic/online support where customers are requested to rate the service after completing the talk or chat with the support staff. Most of us tend to rate the support staff (not the business owner) who have served us and we don’t give bad feedback unless the service is pathetic.

In marketing analytics, we accept such data, but with a degree of skepticism about its truth. We then use tools to study what your customers are doing and how, why and when they are doing it.  Using marketing analytics we can track your customer behavior and you will find a bunch of questions to answer, like –, Why is a customer leaving the page from the checkout page?

Why are people dropping out from the entry page of the website without going forward?

Where are they from?

What age group do they belong to, etc.

When you find the answer to these question you would have a marketing plan and the guide to do things differently the next time.  

Conclusion

These marketing analytics tools tell you about the marketing campaigns and how well they are doing. You can also compare your campaigns against those of the competition and analyze the money spent on campaigns, the channels and their effectiveness—in short, figuring out if the money spent is worth it. However it requires regular and sustained efforts to collect, analyze and act on marketing analytics. This isn’t a one-time process.

There are a variety of techniques that we use to gather insights, evaluate the analytics strategy in the given context and circumstances and then work out a plan of action based on the results and learnings-over and over again.

The underlying maxim is that marketing campaigns need to be tracked, evaluated and analyzed based on the performance. Without a measuring and feedback system you would never know if what you’re doing is right or not. Marketing analysis is therefore a process of testing, reviewing, learning and improvement that runs ad infinitum.

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