How to Use Marketing Data Analytics to Make Better Business Decision

What is marketing data analytics and why do you need it?

Marketing can be tough. It’s even more challenging if you’re just starting out with your new ad campaign or trying different strategies for reaching potential customers.

Without analytics, you’re blind to the performance of your marketing efforts in terms of what works and what doesn’t, this can be inefficient and can lead to negative consequences.

Marketing and data analytics defined

Marketing data analytics is the process of analyzing marketing data to extract actionable insights. This includes identifying key marketing metrics, collecting reliable data, tracking the metrics over time, and using the results to improve future strategies.

“Marketing analytics” sounds like just numbers, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a process that also involves people, tools, and technology to reach marketing goals.

Marketing data analytics gives you the power to understand what’s working and why. This process will help you take full advantage of what it can do.

The importance of data analytics in marketing

Organizations use marketing data analysis in many ways. Let’s look at some common examples:

• Product Intelligence

Analytics can help you track how customers interact with your products. This information can be used to improve the products, from pricing to features, to better align with customer needs.

• Customer Trends and Preferences

By understanding customer trends and preferences, you can adjust your marketing mix to better appeal to your target audience. You can also use this information to segment customers and create targeted marketing campaigns.

• Customer Support

Analytics can be used to improve customer support by identifying areas where customers are having difficulty or need assistance. This information can be used to develop training materials or improve self-service options.

• Messaging and Media

Data analytics can help you understand which messages and media are most effective in reaching and converting customers. This information can be used to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Benefits of data analytics in marketing

Data analytics is becoming increasingly important in today’s business world. Here are some reasons why:

• Better marketing decision. Analytics help you understand your marketing campaigns in a more objective way. This way, you can make better decisions based on facts and data instead of just guessing. For an optimal process, use analytics before and after decision-making. This will help you achieve both tracking campaign success/failure as well as optimizing future plans.
• More revenue. Marketing analytics is a powerful tool for understanding your customers and what they need from you. You can then use this information to reach out with the right message at the right time — increasing revenue streams significantly!
• Save time and money. By analyzing data, you can identify which marketing strategies are most effective in producing results. This allows you to save time on future projects while also ensuring that money isn’t wasted on unproductive efforts.
• Impacts in other areas. Marketing analytics has the potential to impact other areas. For example, it can significantly improve your brand recognition, content quality, channel optimization, and customer understanding.

The challenges of marketing data analytics

Creating an analytics process that measures and tracks meaningful things is sometimes complicated for most companies. The challenges to building an effective analytics process are broad in scope. Let’s take a look at some of the significant challenges below.

• The volume and variety of marketing data

The modern marketing landscape is diverse and complex. Most channels are digital, and campaigns produce content people consume across many devices. While this sheer volume of data is good, marketers find themselves overwhelmed in a data overload situation.

• Lack of resources

Another common challenge is that businesses need more resources to utilize data analytics properly. Staffing up employees who are trained in analytics will take priority. In addition, marketing data analytics requires time and money, but many businesses do not have the budget or staff to dedicate to data analytics, which can limit its usefulness.

• Lack of knowledge and skills

Many marketing organizations need more skills to use data analytics effectively. Marketing data analytics requires a specific set of skills, including statistical analysis, data visualization, and technical skills. Understanding the customers and products well is also important. These skills and knowledge are necessary to make sense of the data and glean actionable insights.

How can data analytics improve marketing strategy?

Businesses can still do marketing without a clearly shaped marketing strategy and analytics process. Startups and small businesses might have no allocation for analytics in their marketing budgets. Can they succeed without this? Unlikely, since marketing analytics adds consistency to your marketing strategy. Having no analytics process is like flying blind, like a vehicle without a dashboard.

The proper implementation of the data analytics process helps you understand the current performance of your marketing effort and what needs to be done to produce better results.

Another role of analytics is to constantly monitor the efficiency of your strategy and change it if necessary. This will help you maintain a steady focus on producing better results.

How to use data analytics in marketing

The marketing analytics process is a continuous cycle of measuring, analyzing, and improving. The following are the marketing analytics steps to help you work efficiently and effectively.

Step 1: Identify metrics

The first step is determining which metrics to use. This will depend on your marketing strategy. It’s no surprise that each marketing organization will have different metrics to support its process.

There are some metrics that marketers usually use in the marketing analytics process. When you’re just starting the process, it’s best to pick only a few metrics. You will want to use more metrics as you get better at it.

Common metrics used in marketing data analytics:

• Website performance metrics

Some examples are traffic, most visited pages, search ranking, unique visits, bounce rate, and conversions.

• Digital ads metrics.

Some metrics are impressions, click-throughs, conversion rate, LTV, ROI, and engagement rate.

• Social media metrics

The key metrics in this category may include total reach, likes, views, comments, shares, followers, and subscribers.

• Email marketing metrics

This can include measures such as open rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate.

Optionally, you can benefit from the following metrics:

• Marketing team performance metrics

These metrics measure how productive the marketing team is. The right metrics in this category are those that help the CMO and the marketing team know how well it is getting its work done. Example metrics in this category may include impressions generated, net profit, and ROI.

• Lead generation metrics

How are you doing with your marketing lead generation? Well, metrics in this category will tell you how effectively your campaigns and channels capture leads. Some example metrics: new leads by channel, new leads by campaign, new opportunities created, qualified leads created, conversion rates, and cost per lead.

• Customer metrics

Some metrics in this category include customer lifetime value (CLV), customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer churn rates.

Step 2: Collect marketing data for analytics

In this step, you will need to collect data from various sources. The type of data may vary depending on where it comes from.

Your websites are likely your primary data source. Why? Because they are the first stop for your customers to get detailed info about your product or service.

You may also need to get data from other sources, such as your CRM and marketing automation tools.

With the right systems in place to capture metrics, understanding your business’s current state is not difficult. For websites, you can capture and monitor their performance by enabling analytics through Google Analytics or another provider. This will also help you to optimize your web presence.

Step 3: Analyze

Now you have collected the data. The next step is to analyze and visualize the metrics to gain correlation and insight.

Dashboards are the type of visualizations you need to display metrics in summary. For more detailed info, you can use reports.

The dashboard that visualizes your marketing metrics provides a bird’s eye view into the health and performance of your marketing team. With the right charts and graphs, you can effectively communicate what is going well and the areas that need improvement.

Step 4: Take improvement actions

Marketing metrics are an excellent way to see what’s going on and why. What you need to do in this step is determine what actions and changes are most likely to yield improvement. No matter how thorough the analysis, it is of no value if it doesn’t lead to some sort of improvement action.

Tools used in data analytics for marketing

Marketing analytics is a complex process. However, it can be made easier with the right tools and technology.

The right tools can make your life easier and more efficient. Tools can help:

• Better understand your data
• Automate tasks
• Segment and target your audience
• Provide real-time and more accurate insights
• Enhance collaboration

Now, let’s take a look at a few of the most popular (and useful) marketing analytics tools. We have broken them down into categories for you:

• Website analytics tools
• You can use web analytics tools to capture and track a variety of website metrics, such as total page views, unique visitors, and time on site.
• Some popular web analytics tools: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mixpanel.
• Business Intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools
• BI tools help you extract raw data from multiple data sources, transform, and load it to a destination. The destination is often in the form of a dashboard or other data visualizations.
• Visual data representations (charts and graphs) are used to gain insights.
• Social media analytics tools
• Tools that fall into this category can be used to track a variety of social media metrics, including engagement, reach, and impressions.
• Some of the most popular social media analytics tools include Sprout Social and Hootsuite.
• Marketing automation tools
• Marketing automation software helps companies automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows.
• Their common features include lead management, email marketing, campaign management, and analytics.

Data analytics for better marketing decisions — final words

Marketing data analytics is vital to making informed business decisions. By understanding what marketing data analytics is and how to use it, you can make better decisions that lead to increased revenue.

While there are challenges to collecting and analyzing marketing data, Coupler.io can help you overcome them with ease. They offer a data analytics consulting service that can help you get started or take your current efforts to the next level.

Authors — Prof.Ramkrishna Bharsakade, Khushi Jhanwar, Ameya Karpe, Mohit Lalwani, Samruddhi Zaware.