Five ways to boost your marketing analytics success
In a rapidly changing business landscape, one thing remains true: data drives decision-making. This is especially true in marketing, where the ability to track and analyze results for insights is more important than ever before.
For many marketers, though, the task of becoming more analytical can seem daunting.
Where do you start? What tools do you need? How do you make sure that your data is accurate? How can you get buy-in for the idea of making your marketing more analytical?
Don’t worry—we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll share five practical tips that will help you make your marketing more analytical. By taking the time to connect your data and track your results, you’ll be able to make better decisions about your campaigns, optimize your spend, and ultimately drive better ROI.
Four benefits of tracking your marketing results
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to make your marketing more analytical, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Why should you bother tracking your results in the first place?
There are four main benefits of being more analytical with your marketing:
Making better decisions
This is perhaps the most obvious benefit of tracking your marketing results: by understanding what’s working and what’s not, you can make better decisions about your future campaigns. If you know that a particular campaign is driving ROI, you’ll be more likely to invest in it. And if you know that a campaign isn’t performing well, you can quickly make changes to improve your results.
Marketing data improves decision-making both at the macro-level, where managers and executives can get a better sense of their strategies and how they’re performing, and at the micro-level, where the day-to-day work of marketing can be optimized and improved.
Optimizing your spending
Another significant benefit of tracking your marketing results is that you can optimize your spending. By understanding which channels are driving the best results, you can ffocus your budget on those channels and cut spending on less effective ones. This will help you get the most bang for your buck — and ultimately drive a better return on investment.
Measuring your success
One of the main goals of any marketing campaign is to measure its success. By tracking your marketing results, you’ll be able to do just that—and understand whether or not your efforts are paying off. This information can be invaluable when it comes time to report back to your boss or clients on how well your campaigns are doing.
Even better, you can gauge the success of your campaigns as they’re running, instead of having to wait until they’ve finished for a post-mortem. This allows you to edit and rethink your campaigns as they run, so you can change your strategy or cut failing ones short.
Understanding your customers
Finally, by tracking and analyzing your marketing data, you’ll be able to better understand your customers. By understanding what they respond to and don’t, you’ll be able to create more relevant and engaging campaigns that will ultimately lead to more sales.
For example, marketing teams can better see what sort of products certain demographics are interested in. With the benefit of more data, they can spot trends and better match products to consumers, leading to more success.
Tips for making your marketing more analytical
Now that we’ve looked at the benefits of making your marketing more analytical, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to do it. Here are five practical tips that will help you get started:
Connect your data
One of the most important steps in making your marketing more analytical is connecting your data. This means bringing all of your data—from all of your different sources—together in one place. By doing this, you’ll be able to get a complete picture of how your marketing is performing and identify trends and patterns that you might not have been able to see before.
A good way to do this is by using a BI tool. A BI tool will allow you to connect to all of your different data sources and then analyze and visualize that data in a way that’s easy to understand. This will give you a clear picture of how your marketing is working—and what steps you should take to adjust as necessary.
Not only will a BI tool help you connect your data, but it will also make it easier to analyze and understand. If you’re serious about making your marketing more analytical, a BI tool is a must-have.
Use data to inform your decisions
One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is relying on gut instinct instead of data when making decisions. If you want to make your marketing more analytical, it’s essential that you start using data to inform your decisions—instead of relying on your gut.
There are a few different ways that you can use data to inform your marketing decisions:
First, use data to choose which channels to focus on. Instead of blindly investing in every new marketing channel that comes along, use data to choose which channels are actually driving results. By understanding which channels are performing well, you can focus your budget on those channels and cut spending on the others.
Next, use data to choose which campaigns to invest in. Instead of investing in every campaign that comes your way, use data to choose which ones are actually worth your time and money. When you have data to back up your decisions, you can be confident that you’re investing in the right campaigns—and that you’re not wasting your time (and money) on ones that aren’t going to perform.
Lastly, use data to understand what’s working and what’s not. By understanding what’s working, you can double down on those efforts—and by understanding what’s not working, you can cut your losses and move on to something else.
Set clear goals
If you want to make your marketing more analytical, it’s important that you set clear goals.
What makes for a quality goal?
A quality goal is well-defined, challenging, but achievable. Your marketing team needs to have a clear idea of what to shoot for and needs to know that what they’re trying to shoot for is actually possible based on their spend and other resources.
However, you want to make sure that they’re not complacent and that they’re actually trying to improve their marketing success.
Some examples of quality marketing goals include:
- Generate X number of leads within the next month
- Increase website traffic by X% within the next quarter
- Improve conversion rate by X% within the next year
Don’t get overwhelmed by setting goals that are too ambitious. Start small, and then gradually increase the difficulty of your goals as you start to see results.
Track your key metrics
What gets measured gets improved.
If you want to make your marketing more analytical, it’s important that you start tracking your progress. This will allow you to see what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments accordingly.
It’s impossible to gauge marketing success without measuring key metrics of success like overall spend, overall ROI, product purchases, and so on. With a BI tool, you can measure these statistics in real time and get up-to-the-minute updates on how you’re performing overall.
This sort of metric tracking is important on a small scale, too. Team members can build dashboards to track their campaign’s key performance indicators so that they’re not blindsided when something goes wrong.
Iterate on your successes
After some time, your marketing team will start to get a good handle on what sorts of strategies are successful and which aren’t. Once a team has a good marketing strategy, though, they shouldn’t stop trying to improve.
Increased data analytics lets marketing teams figure out why campaigns fail and why strategies don’t work. Using this data, they can try these strategies again, but with a better approach.
Maybe a team didn’t dedicate enough spend for one campaign to be of any use, or maybe they targeted the wrong demographic. With better data, businesses can see where things went wrong and try again.
Remember: marketing analytics is an ongoing process
Making your marketing more analytical is an ongoing process, not a one-time event.
Don’t expect to make all of these changes overnight—it will take time to implement them and even more time to see results. But if you’re patient and stick with it, you’ll see your marketing efforts improve.
If you want to start tracking and acting on your actionable marketing analytics data, consider implementing a BI tool. With a cloud-based platform for business intelligence and data analytics, you can get the insights you need to make better decisions and take action quickly.
With a BI tool, you can connect to all of your data sources, get real-time visibility into your marketing performance, and start making data-driven decisions that will improve your results.