Most companies have a wealth of user data at their fingertips. This data can provide insights to inform marketing strategies, boost customer satisfaction, retain and attract customers. The key, however, lies in the way marketers collect, analyze, and leverage that data to reach desired goals. Marketing analytics enables marketers to gain actionable insights that drive results. This article reviews the basic concepts of marketing analytics, including best practices and tools.
What Is Marketing Analytics
The term marketing analytics refers to the processes and technologies Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and marketers use to evaluate their efforts. The evaluation involves the use of different metrics to measure the performance of marketing activities. Marketing analytics processes collect data from all channels and sources and combine it into a single view.
Marketing teams can then use the analyzed data to determine the success of their marketing initiatives and find opportunities for improvement. It’s worth mentioning that marketing analytics and marketing metrics are two distinct aspects. Marketing metrics are the actual data points, while analytics provides context to the data and show how your marketing activities translate to revenue.
What Marketing Analytics Can Do For You
You can achieve many things through marketing analytics. The list below highlights four of these things.
Integration across different marketing channels
Marketing analytics enables you to get a solid look into the relationships between your different marketing channels. You can see how each channel performs and connect the effect of different channels together. This includes channels like blogging, social media, and email marketing.
For example, let’s say you sent emails to some of your leads. Marketing analytics can show you how many people clicked on your email, and how many of those people actually converted into leads. Moreover, you can compare the effect of each email with other marketing campaigns.
People-centric data
The main focus of marketing analytics is the user. You can track how users and leads are interacting with different marketing channels and initiatives over time. Marketing analytics provide important information that you can use for marketing initiatives like lead nurturing.
This information includes the source of the lead, and whether that lead is an active user of your website and blog or not.
Closed-loop data
Closed-loop marketing analytics can tell you whether your leads are actually turning into paying customers. To get closed-loop data, your need to integrate your marketing analytics system with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like HubSpot.
In addition, closed-loop marketing data can help you identify which channels are driving sales. For example, you can find out that your social media is the most effective customer generating channel, or maybe the blog is the main source of engagement.
Customers loyalty
The objective of customer loyalty is to make your customers more loyal to your brand. Marketing analytics enables you to measure customer loyalty with several metrics. One of them is redemption rate, which is the percentage of rewards redeemed by your customer. High redemption rates mean more customers are redeeming their loyalty program rewards. These metrics are especially important for retaining customers loyalty and driving revenue.
Types of Marketing Analytics Tools
Marketing analytics tools collect data from marketing and social channels. They fall into four categories, web analytics, visual behaviour, content analytics, and social media analytics.
Web analytics tools
Web analytics tools track actions, events, and other behavioral, demographic, and technological attributes of visitors within a website or app. Most websites use at least one web analytics tool to monitor user activities. The list of tools include Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and more.
Web analytics tools also monitor quantitative user data like bounce rate, page views, traffic sources, average time on page, site speed, site content, and conversions.
Visual behavior and testing tools
Collecting quantifiable and quantitative behavioral data is not enough. You also need to track how your visitors behave on your website. You need a tool that shows such behavior visually, for easier action and consumption.
This is what visual behavior and testing tools do. These solutions, also known as website optimization tools, track the interaction of users with individual webpages. The tracking is done through conversion funnels, form analysis, heatmaps and session recordings. You can further improve website performance with the help of A/B testing tools based on such data.
Content analytics tools
You always need to stay updated about the latest trends in your field to stay competitive. Content analytics tools keep you on the track with the latest content developed by your competitors in your industry. These tools also help you find influencers in your niche that can improve your content.
Social media analytics tools
You need to track how people engage with your social media content in terms of comments, shares, and likes, together with rich media stats and link clicks. You also have to communicate with the relevant people in your industry. There are specific social media tools that help you find such influencers in your field, such as Agorapulse, and Keyhole.
Marketing Analytics Best Practices
Follow these tips to get the most out of your marketing data:
- Ensure high-quality data—you need a tool that collects both unstructured and structured customer data from all possible sources, including different interactions and touch points.
- Get real-time insights—marketing analytics solutions need to deliver real-time insights. You cannot be effective if your information is out-of-date.
- Perfect your dashboard—your analytics will not be useful if you track many metrics at once. Instead, define your goals and measure results for the most important use cases.
- Select the right analytics visualization—the key to gaining meaningful insights from your data is to choose the most suitable data visualizations. Data visualization enables you to find patterns and context in your data. Choose a marketing analytics solution that enables you to customize your visualizations rather than using default charts for displaying data.
- Use machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools—effective marketing must be predictive and real-time. AI-based tools enable you to enhance each step of the customer journey by analyzing data, making accurate predictions, and making data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
Marketing analytics provides a solution for measuring marketing initiatives and activities. Analytics data enables companies to make data-driven decisions, so organizations save money and time, and teams become more efficient. There are multiple marketing analytics tools you can use to collect data from marketing and social channels. This includes visual behaviour, web analytics, social media, and content analytics.
