What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from marketing campaigns to evaluate the efficacy and success of their marketing activities. It gives you a view of the return of investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns.
To do this, marketing analytics employs various tools to gather data and run the analysis. There are different analytics models one can use. You have your Media Mix models that combine data gathered over a long period of time. There are Multi-touch Attribution models that collect data throughout a buyer’s journey. And you have what is called Unified Marketing Measurement that combines the data gathered from different analytics models to give you a more complete and concrete measure of data in the form of metrics.
Importance of Marketing Analytics
On the financial end of things, marketing analytics gives you the best bang for your buck. By monitoring and gathering data about your marketing campaigns and how effective they are, it gives you a clearer picture of how much value you are getting back from the amount you spent on your campaigns. This helps you when making judgment calls on whether to continue on a certain vein with your marketing or to nix it altogether and hedge your bets.
Marketing analytics, on the customer service or customer experience end of things, allows you to create a realistic buyer persona that helps you to predict what your customers will want or what they will react most positively to when creating your marketing campaigns. This lets you see which programs or campaigns work and which ones don’t and why.
This gives you insight into market trends and helps you make informed decisions. The better and more informed decisions you make, the better your company will perform.
How does Marketing Analytics Affect Customer Experience?
One of the main benefits of marketing analytics is that it allows you to understand your customers better. It is this understanding that makes marketing analytics an excellent tool to help you provide a better customer or buyer experience to your clients.
For example, you are planning to launch a new product. You start on your ad and marketing campaigns to announce this launch and drum up interest and traffic from potential buyers and your customer base into your website — so you try different ways of marketing your brand across different platforms all leading to your page. You then use marketing analytics to track customer activity before, during, and immediately after the launch to check which of your strategies worked best and how the customers interacted with and used your page.
You then discover that advertising with clear images of the product and a short but direct and complete description of it worked best for your customers compared to short videos that flash the product but aren’t very descriptive. You now have a better understanding of which campaign strategies work best for your customers, while your customers get exactly what they want without the extra hubbub of enduring ads in which they have no interest.
This enhances customer experience. The better experience your customer has when they shop with you, the more they want to come back. So with tools that track how they move within your web page, which products they gravitate towards, and the sticking points in their shopping journey, you can get a clear picture on how you can provide a better shopping experience.
Using heat maps can give you an idea of which area your customers focus on when using your website. This is basically an arrow pointing you towards which content they want to see more of and which areas need more exposure. You can capitalize on your heat map data by designing your webpage in a way that would leverage on featuring more of what is trending currently and subtly pointing your customers towards the other parts of the webpage that they have yet to explore. From the customer’s point of view, you are giving them more of what they want and showing them things that may pique their interest.
Marketing analytics also gives you an excellent data pool to allow for personalization. Personalization is where you provide your customers with a personalized shopping or surfing experience. This shows your customers how well you pay attention to their needs by showing them what they need and products they might want to try based on their previous activities and the trend of people who have the same taste they do. Personalized recommendations derived from that specific customer’s data help retain that customer all while making it easier for them to shop. A personalized shopping experience is akin to receiving VIP treatment. You can even go one step further and have email campaigns alerting customers to new products that are tailored to their tastes.
Conclusion
Marketing analytics is like being given a crystal ball that gives you a peek into how your customers’ minds work. This is your own file of cheat codes that will allow you to get ahead of the game. You can give the customers what they want, enhancing their user experience, and grow your profit margins at the same time.
