If data is wind energy, then marketing analytics is the turbine used to harness its power.
While spend in marketing analytics continues to rise, many digital marketers struggle to use marketing analytics correctly. Despite reports of expected growth to exceed 10% of a marketer’s budget in the next few years, 40% of marketers claim to not have the tools or resources to accurately measure their marketing efforts. Without the ability to accurately measure performance of campaigns, a marketer is more likely to make bad calls that hamper performance.
The use of marketing analytics can help solve this problem by giving marketers processes and resources to measure, manage, and analyze their marketing performance. As a result, marketers can make improvements to their strategies and achieve better results.
If you’re struggling to measure and improve the performance of your marketing campaigns, consider these ways that marketing analytics can help:
1. Consolidated Reporting
To gain a stronger understanding of your marketing performance, you should consolidate all your reports into a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Not only will this help you see the full picture with minimal effort, you’ll also be better equipped to make data-driven decisions.
This is important because there are so many metrics to track and unique KPIs for every digital channel. Having a way to connect them all together will help you determine what story the data tells. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to glean new insights and optimize your campaigns.
Expert tip: As you consolidate your reporting into a single dashboard, make sure to include these performance and conversion metrics:
- Traffic:
- Traffic by source
- Cost per click
- Clickthrough rate
- Engagement:
- Bounce rate by source
- Time on site by source
- Conversions:
- Total conversions
- Conversions by source
- Conversion value
- Cost per conversion
While there are a myriad of other marketing metrics to include in your dashboard, these are a great starting point.
Check this out: Wondering what other metrics you need to know?
2. Strategic Planning
You might think that planning comes before analysis, but marketing analytics should always inform your planning. Before you sit down with your team to discuss your next strategy, take time to review your marketing analytics. Through this exercise, you’ll uncover new insights that will help you prepare a smarter plan and more effective strategy.
Here are some of the ways that marketing analytics can improve your strategy planning:
- Audience segmentation: Know who your customers are and separate them into individual categories. Which group is bringing driving the best results (ROI, revenue, order volume)? With this knowledge, you focus your strategy to reach more customers like them.
- Budget reallocation: Ask yourself: which channels are driving the most revenue? It may make sense to lean into these channels and pull back from others. Smarter spending will drive your marketing results that much further.
- Creative messaging: Look for any patterns in the top-performing creative by channel. You should know which messages resonate and why. Use this insight to guide your creative direction moving forward.
When you put these tips into practice, you’ll come up with better ideas, make data-driven decisions, and see better results.
3. Experimentation
Using marketing analytics, you can transform testing into a science. Marketing analytics helps you eliminate the guesswork by giving you access to more data which you can use to uncover new insights. With this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about new tests to pursue. The more you test, the more opportunity you can dig up.
We encourage our teams at Booyah to think like mad scientists because consistent experimentation always leads to better results.
To get into this type of winning mindset, consider some of ways you can use marketing analytics to test more frequently:
- Messaging
- Ask yourself: which of our messages resonates most with consumers and how can we use this insight to improve our strategy? You won’t find the answer in the bottom line. Instead, you can use your marketing dashboard to group the different types of messaging into unique buckets. Analyze engagement across every channel to form new hypotheses. Then, test your hypothesis with new messages. Does the data support your hypothesis, or does it prove it wrong?
- Creative
- Here’s the scene: Your designer prepares the creative and your copywriter creates the copy. You manage the campaign and prepare your reports. The department head reviews the reports and tells you to only run with the first set of ads because that’s what drove the most revenue throughout the month. But there’s another way. By bringing marketing analytics into the whole process, you can set up a framework that gives every member invaluable insight into their work. For example, say your copywriter suspects that free shipping is more compelling than fast shipping. You do an A/B test and experiment with other descriptions, too. Your copywriter checks on the dashboard and sees that “fast & free shipping” performs best, so they lean into it. Sales increase. End of story.
Using data effectively, you can gain access to a treasure trove of insights. You just need to know how to find it. Marketing analytics is the treasure map that guides marketers to fortune. Keep this in mind and create a framework for smarter data-driven marketing. Set up processes that facilitate knowledge sharing across teams. Find the tools that make marketing analytics accessible to every member of your team. If you aren’t doing this already, you’re falling behind.
With this guide in hand, you can begin to harness the power of your data more effectively and unleash the full impact of your marketing strategies.
And if you need help along your way, you can get in touch with our expert team.
