Marketing Analytics – What Is It and How Can You Use It?

Did you know 54% of companies have experienced higher profits with marketing analytics? More than 37% CMOs rely on marketing analytics in decision-making. Almost one-third of marketers say marketing analytics is the most effective measure of a campaign’s performance.

If you take the above stats at face value, marketing analytics is emerging as the secret recipe to success in a hyper-competitive world. It can help you keep pace with the competition, customer expectations, and advancing technology by uncovering the means to refine your campaign. Though analytics has been around for a while, most businesses have vague knowledge about marketing analytics Dashboard. In this piece, we shall dive deep into understanding marketing analytics and how you can use it.

What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is an assessment of marketing data to gather insights and use this knowledge to streamline your marketing effort. It lets you understand your campaign’s performance and identify the scope of improvement. The process involves gathering and organizing data mined from different marketing channels (including third-party sources) and consolidating it into a centralized report. These reports offer actionable intelligence to optimize marketing campaigns leading to faster client acquisition, more sales, and increased brand equity.

How Can Businesses Use Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is used to personalize campaigns and cater to the niche needs of end customers. It helps marketers in measuring the success and effectiveness of their campaigns. Businesses use this information to identify emerging trends and spot opportunities for informed decision-making.

Let us take you through five essential uses of marketing analytics in a data-driven business world.

1. Improving Product Knowledge

Marketing analytics lets you gain accurate product knowledge, which is key to success in a competitive world. You can dig deep into the performance of your products. Gain product knowledge through market surveys and polls and align products based on changing trends in the market.

2. Understanding Customer Preferences

To remain ahead of the competition, you need to know your customers. Marketing analytics lets you do that – know their preferences, tastes, likes, and dislikes. Let your sales and marketing team leverage this to improve customer loyalty and retention. Customer retention is key to success as you will spend 5X on acquiring new customers than retaining existing ones.

3. Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Achieving high levels of customer satisfaction should be your key business goal. Unhappy customers are the greatest threat to your business, and in the worst case, this can lead to an existential crisis. A thorough marketing analysis would help you identify the symptoms of dissatisfaction and their causes, letting you take corrective measures.

4. Gaining Competitive Intelligence

Your business must stay ahead of the competition to thrive in the market. Marketing analytics lets you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. This process involves using data on competitors from open sources to understand their business models and develop counter strategies.

5. Studying Future Landscape

Spotting emerging b2b marketing trends early helps your business stay ahead in the game. With marketing analytics, you can study the future landscape and the changing aspirations of customers, the development of new technologies, and other socio-political factors that would impact your industry.

How to Start With Marketing Analytics

By now, you know the importance and possibilities of marketing analytics, but the lack of an action plan can spoil the party. Most businesses tend to get stuck here, and you can overcome this challenge with this five-step guide to implementing marketing analytics in your business.

1. Set Your Goals Right

Marketing analytics offers a diverse range of insights, and this can lead to a temptation toward maximalism. Setting your priorities and focusing on data that matters to your brand is essential. Shortlist data points and figures that have the maximum impact on your business and start analyzing them. Avoid getting carried away with information that may look interesting but doesn’t add value to your marketing.

2. Know Your Marketing System and Capabilities

Start by assessing your capabilities and know your marketing systems well. You must have access to enough data and a trained team. Marketing analytics can hit a dead end when you don’t know how your data is collected, its quality, and whether they are compatible with the marketing analytics software. If you lack in-house know-how, work with a professional team that cleanses your data to achieve desired outcomes.

3. Bring Disparate Systems and Platforms Together

Your business gathers insights and information on customers through different touchpoints – web, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, etc. Storing customer information on multiple platforms can complicate data analysis. Break data silos and invest in a customer data platform or CDP to build a centralized source of persistent data. Bring disparate data systems and platforms together to achieve unified insights into your customer’s buying journey.

4. Consolidate Reports From Unified Platforms

Standardize data and transform it for complete integration from diverse platforms. Doing so will build a single customer profile irrespective of the touchpoint. It will let you generate actionable insights on your customers, map their buying journey, and improve the scope of your future marketing campaigns. Highlight success stories and failures in these marketing reports for future reference.

5. Choose The Right Marketing Analytics Software

Manual marketing analytics can be tedious and impossible when you have an extensive database. Choose a marketing Integration Platform to overcome this challenge. These tools use your marketing data from various sources and consolidate them into reports. Get complete insight into your existing and potential customers, opportunities in the market, and the risks in your business domain.

Final Thoughts

We all know data is the holy grail for marketing success. However, raw data doesn’t drive marketing campaigns and needs to be refined into actionable intelligence. Marketing analytics can be the differentiator in your campaign turning data into information. It helps you gain customer insights, study the trends in the market and reveal competitors’ strategies.