If you're planning on launching a marketing campaign or have already established one, you must know how to use marketing analytics to benefit your company and consumers. Through marketing analytics, you can learn consumer behavior patterns and create a good customer experience. This will make your audience realize your brand values them, maintaining customer retention.
A good marketer knows the sheer importance of marketing analytics. They help the brand understand its target audience, enhance its techniques and products, and connect with its consumers, which is essential to gain their trust.
What is marketing analytics? The study of marketing-related data helps businesses comprehend consumers' reactions to their brands and products. Marketing analytics help you understand what products or activities drive your potential customers away and what attracts them to your brand. If you're not using marketing analytics correctly, you're not reaping full benefits from your promotional campaign.
Importance of Marketing Analytics
You started a marketing campaign, and the results are visible. Your sales have increased, and your website and social media pages are getting higher engagement rates. Why do you still need to use marketing analytics? The answer is simple. To maintain that flow of customers and increase it.
Below are some reasons you should invest your time and money in marketing analytics.
1. Answer Vital Questions
Using marketing analytics, you can learn about the return on investment on your campaign. It will tell you about the benefits your company is gaining from the campaign, which can assist in making critical decisions, such as if you should continue the same marketing strategies or make changes. Or if the return on investment is worth spending time and money on.
2. Help in Making Future Plans
Predictive insights help brands make crucial decisions for the future and create highly impactful marketing strategies to educate future customers about the product. You can also consider the return on investment and the product's performance to develop plans.
3. Show Consumer Behaviour Pattern
Image taken from Strikingly’s user’s website
Without using marketing analytics, companies would have to guess consumers' behavior. This doesn't bring out accurate results and can fail the strategies you created by guessing customer behavior.
Marketing analytics show correct consumer behavior patterns, enabling your brand to create an excellent customer experience, interact with your existing and potential users, and build meaningful consumer relationships. When your company has a relationship with your customers, trusting your brand gets easier for the users. And the more credible your brand is in customers' eyes, you get more chances of generating sales.
Types of Marketing Analytics and their Roles
Three significant types of marketing analytics play different roles in helping you understand user data.
1. Descriptive Analytics
Through descriptive analytics, you can learn about your previous performance. It enables you to compare past data with the present to know your campaign's current performance.
For instance, you take your recent blog post's performance data for the first thirty days and compare it with your past blog post's data. This can tell if your blog posts are performing better, the same, or poor than the previous posts.
2. Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics use previous data to predict future demands and profits. It involves massive volumes of data and machine learning algorithms to generate exact predictions over time.
Predictive analytics can also be done manually, but a human wouldn’t be able to reach the machine’s iteration speed or meet its accuracy. Predictive analytics have become increasingly popular in the market because it helps businesses provide personalized content to their potential users based on their liking.
3. Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics gives you suggestions to make an impact. For instance, you got a prediction from predictive analytics that your site will have a massive number of visitors at a particular time this month or year. Prescriptive analytics suggests how you can reap the utmost benefits from this prediction.
How to Use Marketing Analytics?
There are three major components of marketing analytics that make your strategies effective. Those ingredients are:
- Gathering exact and timely data
- Examining the data to recognize patterns.
- Acting according to the insights you obtained from the data.
You're probably making a mistake if your analysis doesn't include even one of these elements. Below we've discussed some tips that include the critical components of marketing analytics.
1. Invest in the Right Tools to Gather and Store Your Data
There are numerous sources you can collect the data from. These sources include website analytics, email marketing data, social media insights, advertisement insights, etc.
You can collect this data in numerous ways. On social media platforms, you can see the insights of your posts, ads, and accounts. For a deeper dive, you can use social media analytics tools that tell you more detailed information than most social media platforms don't.
You can use your site's analytics or numerous software that gives detailed information about a website's engagement.
After you've retrieved that data, you need to store it where you can quickly analyze it. The valuable idea is to save your data using a business intelligence tool. A BI tool will help you connect all the data from your business tools. Then, you can merge and compare the data to spot patterns and trends.
2. Segment Your Data
A convenient way of analyzing massive amounts of data is by breaking it into smaller segments. You can make smaller groups based on the characteristics or actions of your audience, such as age, location, gender, income, and education. Consider sorting groups by their reactions to your marketing campaign, such as the ones who started following your brand's accounts, began frequently shopping from your website, stopped shopping from your website, or only scrolled through your site without clicking any buttons or links.
Sorting the data in groups can help you solve problems without a mix-up. Say you want to devise a solution for people who scroll your website without engaging with any links or buttons. You can run social media ads and send newsletters to see what can get those customers to engage. This tip is an example of examining and acting according to the data.
3. Analyze for both Positives and Negatives
Analyzing positive results will tell you what drives the customers toward your brand so you can continue it. And examining the adverse outcomes will tell you what actions take your customers away. This will help you recognize your brand's weaknesses and develop a way to overcome them.
Marketing Analytics Mistakes to Avoid
When using marketing analytics, many marketers make spending time and money on collecting and managing marketing data pointless.
1. Not Taking Any Actions
Some marketers study the collected data but fail to take action according to it. It's essential to act according to the conclusion because just analyzing it won't make any changes.
2. Collecting All the Data
Many people have this misconception that the more data, the better. It should be the more relevant your data is, the better. Many marketers would only collect and store massive amounts of data if they knew which piece was appropriate and what to do with it.
Gathering irrelevant data costs you money. It would be taking up space and resources, you might need relevant data, and when you want to store and manage relevant data, you would have no choice but to spend more money to make space.
3. Not Making Any Plans
Some marketers would begin collecting the data without planning their goals. If you don't know what you're supposed to achieve, then how would you be able to collect relevant data?
Gain Access to Strikingly's Analytics Features
Image taken from Strikingly
Before you proceed with working on the marketing analytics data you collected, let us introduce you to Strikingly's built-in analytics features.
First of all, what is Strikingly? It is a website builder that enables you to create spectacular responsive websites using pre-designed templates. You can edit the templates in Strikignly's intuitive site editor, which doesn't require coding or web design experience.
When you've created a website with Strikingly, you will see the analytics option in your dashboard. The Strikingly analytics tell you:
- The country a visitor is coming from.
- The source which brought them to your site.
- The number of unique visitors to your website.
Image taken from Strikingly
You can also view your website's day for different periods, such as one month, the past seven days, etc.
Moreover, you can view more data metrics for your Strikingly online store. Here are the metrics your Simple Store analytics will keep you updated with:
- Sales for every product page.
- Clicks
- Conversions
You can use this data to predict the demand for your products, what products should be removed or improved, or what products need more robust marketing strategies. To level up your analytics game, you can connect Google Analytics to your Strikingly site and reap valuable data from both built-in site analytics and Google.
Now that you know the correct use of marketing analytics, the mistakes you should avoid, and how you can gather accurate data, don't wait to study it. Start acting according to your marketing analytics results today, and see a noticeable change in your business's revenue.
