What Business Owners Should Know About Using Data Analytics in Marketing

Most of us have made a decision based on our intuition. Sometimes, it’s easy to make a choice based on how we feel about the options that are in front of us. In everyday life it’s usually not much of a problem to make a decision based on how we feel about it, but when it comes to business, it’s not always the best strategy. After all, our guts are not always one hundred percent reliable when it comes to telling us what we need to do, especially when it comes to making decisions based on the actions of other people, like your clients and customers.

Big decisions that are likely to have a large impact on your business’s performance in the future should always be backed up with data. Marketing analytics can be used to determine if your gut feeling is right or if you should take another direction when it comes to deciding what to do next with a new product, service or strategy. Marketing analytics provides you with a means of measuring and analyzing your company’s marketing performance, allowing you to make the most strategic future decisions to boost return on income and ensure that the steps that you take are the most efficient. You will be able to use marking analytics to look at your marketing efforts in a more objective way and make sure that you are getting the most from your marketing budget.

Why Does Your Business Need Marketing Analytics?

In the past, marketing involved a lot of guesswork. Business owners and marketers often found themselves taking a shot in the dark when it came to their leads and marketing strategy, since there was often no way to tell where a lead came from unless you straight up asked the customer where they found you. Information provided by customers when asked was the only way of finding out which the best strategies and marketing tactics were for getting the best results and bringing in the most leads.

Today, however, things are very different. Digital marketing is the new normal for businesses of all sizes and in all industries, and the majority of companies will find your brand online. The internet has become the first place where people go when they are looking for information on new products and services that they might be interested in. Marketing analytics ensures that businesses have the tools that they need to gather the relevant information for finding solid leads and growing their customer base.

Companies of all sizes are now gathering huge amounts of data on a regular basis, whether they are doing this intentionally or not. If your business is not taking advantage of the data that it collects by using marketing analytics, you can be sure that your competitors probably are. Competitors may not only be analyzing the data that they collect, but also analyzing your company to learn more about their audience and make better marketing decisions.

How is Marketing Analytics Used

Marketing analytics is a process that can be used for measuring and learning about anything to do with your company; there are endless possibilities. Marketing analytics can be used for anything from the simplest of metrics regarding your website visitors to huge datasets that you have collected to base your biggest and most important marketing campaigns around.

On your website, marketing analytics can be used in a number of different ways to find out more about who is visiting the site for the first time, who is returning, what they are looking at on your website, where they have come from on the web, how long they spend on your website, if they linger over certain areas of the site for longer than others, and when and why they leave the page. Analyzing these metrics gives you a clearer understanding of how your website is performing, allowing you to make strategic future decisions based on what you know is working well and what you know might be putting visitors off.

Marketing analytics can also be used in further depth to help the business determine the search terms that are used the most when it comes to them and the services or products that they offer. Marketing analytics is particularly useful for inbound sales since it allows you to put the data that you collect to use by determining which customers to reach out to and how to get in touch with them to encourage them to return to your business.

Another strategy that businesses will often use marketing analytics for is paid advertising. Since you’re investing a lot of money into marketing your business online, it pays to analyze the data that you collect to get a clearer idea of who your target audience is, what they are searching for, where they are, and how they behave. You can then use this information to target the relevant audience at a very sophisticated level and make more strategic decisions about who your business is targeting and why.

The Main Benefits of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics can seriously benefit a business in many different ways. You can learn more about marketing analytics and data analysis for business with Emerson College’s Master of Arts in Digital Marketing and Data Analytics (DMDA) online program. Visit the Emerson College website to find out more. Some of the main benefits of data analysis in marketing for businesses include:

Make Sense of Your Results

Marketing analytics is often used to help business owners and marketers gain a clearer understanding of what’s happening in terms of their current marketing strategies and the factors that lead there. Using data analytics to track your marketing campaigns will make it easier to see what your results are on an ongoing basis and make quick decisions on the fly in order to ensure that you stay on track. As a result, you are more likely to see a successful campaign by staying up to date with it, rather than waiting until the campaign is over to figure out what went wrong.

Learn Why Things Happen

Marketing analytics can provide business owners and marketers with a much greater insight into what has happened in the past, and why things worked out that way. This can be useful if you have headed a marketing campaign that went better or worse than you expected. Marketing teams will often use past information on campaigns for future strategies to determine what has worked in the past and is worth using again, alongside which strategies are unlikely to work based on past performance.

Marketing analytics uses a combination of descriptive analysis, marketing automation platforms, and customer relationship management software to provide marketers and business owners with clear details on what has happened in the past and what led to those results. For example, you can use marketing analytics to find out more about why certain metrics have performed a certain way, or the factors that had an impact on sales numbers of a new product.

Make Accurate Predictions

While nobody has the power to completely predict what is going to happen in the future, you can get fairly close when using data analytics. Business owners and marketers will often use predictive analysis to get a clearer understanding of customer behavior in order to better anticipate how they might respond to your future campaigns and marketing strategies. For example, you can use web analytics software to determine when and why a visitor might leave your web page based on the actions of your previous customers. This information can then be used to make improvements to the website at the point where customers will typically leave in order to encourage them to stay on the site for longer. You can also put marketing analytics to use when retaining your existing customers by using data to determine which customers are more likely to return to your business based on their past behavior.

Bigger Marketing Impact

The use of data analytics in marketing gives business owners and marketers the opportunity to combine data with their marketing goals to make more impactful decisions. Translating the data that you collect on your target audience and customers with analytics allows you to better determine which customers are going to be the most profitable to target and how to go about it to get the best results. When used with market research, data analytics goes further than simply learning more about lead generation and sales metrics, allowing you to get a deeper understanding of your target customers and make more strategic decisions when it comes to building a future relationship with them.

How to Use Data in Your Marketing Strategy

A data-driven marketing strategy requires you to get into a data-driven mindset, collecting as much data as possible on your target audience and putting it to use wherever possible to learn more about your customers and how to get the best results from them. Some of the key factors that are involved in using data in your marketing strategy include:

Defining Your Objectives and Goals

First of all, it’s important to determine exactly what you want to achieve by using data analysis in your marketing strategy. Who are you targeting? Do you want to gain leads, sales, or improve brand awareness? Are you hoping to push sales for a new product or service or revive an older one? Understanding exactly what you hope to do with your data-driven marketing strategy will set the tone when it comes to choosing which data analysis tools to use, where to implement them, and what to look for in the data that you collect.

Choosing the Right Tools

Today, there are hundreds of data analysis tools available for businesses of all sizes to take advantage of. The tools that you use can make all the difference to both the data that you are able to collect on your target audience, and how it is interpreted. For many businesses, the first and most important tool to consider is a customer relationship management platform (CRM). Using a CRM, you will be able to track your customers’ movements from the moment that they place an order or get in touch with your business, all the way through to completion. This allows you to learn more about customer behavior and gather data that you can utilize in your future marketing campaigns for customer acquisition and retention. Not only can you learn more about how your existing customers act when shopping with your business, but it will also provide you with information that you can use to make the process easier and more appealing to new customers in the future.

Learn from Your Competition

If you’re not analyzing the data that you collect for marketing, chances are that your competitors might be. Analyzing your competitors is almost as important as analyzing your own target audience, since it gives you the chance to determine what they are doing to attract the customers that you are hoping to encourage to choose your brand over the other options. Analyzing your competitors is not about copying them, but rather using the information that you can find on their brand and customers to determine what works well for your shared target audience and make the right marketing decisions for the future.

Prioritize Customer Experience

Finally, the customer experience should always be the main priority when you are putting a data-driven marketing strategy in place. Gathering, tracking and analyzing the data that you collect will make it easier for your business to determine whether or not your customers are satisfied with the experience that your brand provides them with, and if not, what you could do to improve this and encourage them to remain loyal. When you use data to ensure that the customer experience is your top priority, you will often find that everything else falls into place much easier. Data can also be analyzed to find out more about the customers that remain loyal to your brand, and why, so that this can be replicated with new customers in the future.

Today, data is more important in marketing than ever before. If your business is not using marketing analytics, it is missing out on a wealth of benefits.