How to Learn Marketing Analytics
I’ve been interested in analytics ever since I was a child. I used to create small pie charts to find out who I talked the most with. And then at the age of 17, I was creating excel sheets figuring out how much money I would have to save on a daily and monthly basis to purchase a scooter. And then I started delving into internet marketing and that’s what peaked my interest in how to learn marketing analytics.
Because it’s all about analytics when it comes to marketing. And that’s what fascinates me the most. The fact that if all the analytics make sense and fall under the thresholds you define, you are guaranteed to have a profitable campaign.
And since then, I’ve never stopped learning about analytics. And the amazing thing about this is that there is always something more to learn. Something that will just amaze you that you didn’t know it existed. That’s what I love the most.
So, let’s stop with my love for learning analytics and let’s dive into how you can start learning about it as well and take advantage of it.
Here we go.
What Is Marketing Analytics?
In simple terms, marketing analytics is all about tracking, managing and studying the metrics from your marketing campaigns in order to determine the ROI of your efforts. These metrics can also help you identify more marketing opportunities and also help you manage your current campaigns efficiently.
Metrics are the lifeblood of analytics. It is literally impossible to talk about analytics without any metrics.
These metrics are the data points from your marketing campaigns.
So what is analytics then?
It is the practice of putting all those metrics into the context of your brand and market. Basically putting all those metrics on the canvas and painting a complete picture. This is what allows companies to explain things to investors and managers about a particular company and how they can further improve their bottom line.
The Importance of Marketing Analytics
I can understand that you already have your hands full with all the things you need to do for your company. Ranging from scheduling follow-ups with potential clients to launching new campaigns and increasing awareness about your brand.
Adding one more thing to your to-do list would just make you start procrastinating.
But trust me, this is the thing that will literally put boosters under your shoes and get your brand above the ground like you have never seen before.
You see, till now you just had a gut feeling about what things are working and what is not. You might have a small feeling that the time you spend at the local chamber of commerce is worth it because you got 2 clients from it last month. But if you haven’t been monitoring and measuring your progress, you have no concrete way of pinning it down as a successful marketing tactic.
So how do you pin it down?
You start tracking everything. And that’s where the marketing analytics come into play.
There are different programs in the market that will help you do just that and maybe even more. Because let’s be honest, we all have 24 hours in the day. It’s how we use them, is what determines if we will be successful at what we are trying to achieve. So why not track, measure and monitor each and every activity that you perform relating to your business.
This will not only make sure that you are maximizing your time on the money making activities, it will also give you new opportunities that you hadn’t realized before.
Here’s a small checklist that you will be able to see with a marketing analytics tool:
- Monitoring trends over time
- Determine which marketing tactics worked and why
- Understanding the big-picture marketing trends
- Understanding the ROI of each program
- Forecasting results of your efforts
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Remember, any successful company has marketing analytics that is backed by concrete numbers and the context behind them. No one wants to finance or support a company that is based on marketing that solely depends on the gut feeling of success.
Everyone wants analytics that give them a detailed insight of everything and also the context that make sense of every metric that they see in there.
You can think of metrics as the letters of the alphabet. And the analytics as the words and sentences. You’ll need to arrange those letters in a specific way to make sense of it. And also to help someone else understand them.
4 Types of Marketing Analytics
Under the umbrella of marketing analytics, or any analytics in that matter, there are 4 sub-categories: Business Intelligence, Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Optimization.
Whenever you are running a marketing campaign, you always gather an ocean of data under these 4 categories. But it’s not categorized or extract any actionable intel from that data. And that is the reason why most marketing campaigns fail.
So, let’s dive into each sub-category and see what they are about. This will help you recognize what type of data you are gathering so you can extract proper information from those metrics.
- Business Intelligence
As the name suggests, this all about knowing how a particular business is performing. The more up-to-date information you have the better.
You can start by tracking the performance of the past 30 days. This would include the conversion rates of a specific marketing campaign, the sales, and the money spent and the total profit.
You will also track the different marketing channels and see which one is bringing in the most bucks, aka, the winning combination.
Usually, all this data is present on the dashboard of a marketing analytics tool. And because of that people just call it “analytics”.
- Descriptive Analytics
This sub-category includes everything about segmentation and clustering your target market. Like what are the different market segments that you are dealing with?
What do your customers look like? What is their gender, age, occupation and the region they live in? You can further divide the data into their interests, their income, etc.
You also want to know where your high-value customers are coming from. And how do they differ from all the other customers?
This will help you easily segment, cluster or profile the audience and cater to them specifically.
So not only will this result in the creation of laser targeted products, it will also help the customers by ensuring that they do not get confused when making a decision. They will see exactly what they want and they will buy it.
- Predictive Analytics
As the name suggests, this type of analytics is all about predictions. People love to predict how the market will turn out and how a particular marketing campaign will perform. That’s exactly the reason why this sub-category exists.
But it is also a crucial one because it is important to know well in advance about the people who will respond well to your campaign, and through what channel. Once you know that, you will also be able to decide what the potential value per customer will be.
If you have a subscription-based product, you can predict whether your prospects will continue with your subscription or cancel. And if they will cancel it, when will they do that.
With the help of all those metrics/data points, you can decide how to market to that segment. Not only that, you can then dig into the reasons why your customers are canceling the subscriptions and see if you can change some things to avoid that.
- Optimization
This type of analytics is all about optimizing the entire marketing campaign as much as possible. And that means you will be asking yourself a lot of “what if” questions.
Because at the end of the day, optimization is all about covering all the objections a customer might have and giving them an appropriate solution to close them.
You will also be asking yourself questions about the budget and how you would spend it. What if you spend more money on Facebook ads rather than sponsoring YouTube channels? How will that work out?
Which combination of spending would yield the most ROI?
Top Marketing Analytics Tools
Without any marketing analytics tool, you will just throw yourself back into the 1950s where you will be tracking everything in a book. And that will take a lot of your time and resources that could easily be spent on better things like optimizing your campaigns and getting rid of the ones that aren’t yielding desired results.
So to avoid that, I have listed some of the best marketing analytics tools out there in the world. These will not only help you track everything relating to your business, they will also help you identify the important aspects of each and every marketing campaign.
Here we go:
This is an all-in-one internet marketing analytics tool. What this means, is that you will be able to see everything on a single dashboard.
Cyfe will help you see real-time reports of your current campaigns that are running, historical data and also custom data sources that you can input in the tool to receive.
Does this mean that you will manually have to feed data to this tool?
Absolutely not.
All you need to do is connect it with your appropriate tracking tools, like the Google Analytics and it will gather all the data for you.
This tool is all about optimization of your marketing campaigns. And believe me when I say, that it leaves nothing out.
Not only will it help you find some of your best customers, it will also help you keep your current ones by suggesting appropriate changes to your services/products, etc.
It analyzes the behavior of your audience and helps you automate your engagement with them. This creates the feedback you will need to improve your products and services.
You will be able to see exactly where you are losing your customers and how they behave on your website over time. You can also split test different versions of your website, track revenue, segment your audience and also automate your marketing.
If you want to create and nurture very close relationships with your customers, this is the tool you should use.
Marketing is all about doing things better than your competitors, and that’s exactly what this tool helps you with. SEMrush gives you the ability to take a closer look at how your competitors are marketing online.
This will not only help you adjust and optimize your strategy, it will also allow you to ensure that you do not make the same mistakes that they do.
SEMrush is mostly targeted toward companies who are trying to beat their competition in search rankings.
With this tool, you will be able to unlock the doors to a treasure of information about your competitors. You will be able to see which keywords they are using, their AdWords ad strategies, their marketing budget, ad copy, etc.
Not only that, you will also be able to see some new organic competition that you might have not yet discovered.
So, if you are a person who is very keen on beating their competition in search rankings, this is the perfect tool for you.
Conclusion
While it is always fun to talk about marketing in general, I know it is not always fun when you are directly dealing with so much data in a single moment. And that is the reason why marketing analytics is so important because you can categorize each metric and take a look at it separately.
This avoids you being overwhelmed and also helps you make decisions with a clear mind.
So, if you haven’t been using any marketing analytics tools, you should start using them now because they will only make your life easier.
From now on, you won’t have to guess what to do next, because you will already have all the data you need to make your next decision.