7 Advantages of Marketing Analytics (And How To Get Started Today)

Marketing analytics is the practice of managing, analyzing data to answer questions, determining the ROI of marketing efforts, and identifying potential improvements. Marketing analytics is made possible by tracking business performance data and indicator metrics.

Marketing metrics are critical because they allow businesses to better understand high-level marketing trends and determine which campaigns/efforts worked and why. Forecasting future results can also become possible with the right marketing analytics tools.

1. Marketing Analytics Enables Customer Journey Personalization

Each customer has their own journey before finally purchasing a product. Customer journeys have multiple touchpoints with your channels. Marketing analytics can provide information about how customers are interacting with your brand, social media, and what they are searching for.

Having these insights enables you to provide customers with information at each stage of their journey. Once a purchase is made — you can continue mapping how the customer interacts with your content and message accordingly to bring more product growth. This can be a huge advantage especially if your competitors aren't doing this.

2. Marketing Data Integration

Marketing departments have multiple efforts running simultaneously across teams and platforms. Collecting data from all these channels can be difficult and requires coordination and collaboration.

The right marketing data analytics tool can be game-changing by centralizing all of your data for analysis. Once you have the data in one location, you can start identifying which efforts are producing results and determine where funding should be allocated.                  

Read The Definitive Guide to Modern Marketing Data Analytics

3. Campaign Optimization

Campaigns are a critical part of any marketing organization, not having any data from your campaigns is less than ideal and can result in wasted time and resources. Having data on its own is useless. Marketers need to extract value from the data to identify opportunities and optimize campaign performance.

With marketing analytics, you can develop data-backed strategies to drive campaign performance and give your business an advantage compared to competitors. You will have more confidence in your A/B tests and your ability to tune them based on customer data.

Campaign optimization can look different at each company. However, an important factor that is always considered is campaign spend attribution: this is all about maximizing the ROI of campaigns. This could look like a multi-touch attribution model which displays all of the touchpoints the customers interact with. If a customer opens an email and fills out a form, they are ultimately "making a purchase" in B2B marketing. This model would allow you to see all the different stages of their journey to becoming a customer.

4. Improved Cohort Segmentation

When developing a marketing strategy, because prospects have different backgrounds, preferences, and personalities it’s important to understand that one strategy will not work for all of them.

Cohort segmentation allows you to break consumers into groups so that different strategies can be used for better results. Understanding each group is critical to being able to connect your product with the consumer.

As your strategies improve, you will collect higher-quality data to better your efforts and your ability to drive business. Consumers respond well to personalized marketing and with the right data, you can have highly effective personalized messaging.

5. Marketing Attribution Modeling

While understanding what path your customers took before making a purchase is important, you don’t know which part of that journey was the most impactful in the final decision. Attribution modeling can give you that information by revealing which touchpoints in the customer journey were effective.

A marketing attribution model will assign a score to each touchpoint based on how influential it was in the journey. Making it easier to identify and invest in the most effective touchpoints for future efforts in order to give your business an advantage.

If used correctly attribution models will help you raise more funding for your projects and increase the ROI of your investments. Attribution models need to be maintained or changed to stay relevant.

6. Awareness Analysis

In today’s fast-paced market, products compete ruthlessly for brand awareness. After all, if nobody knows about your brand they most likely won't become a customer.

Conducting a brand awareness analysis is difficult because even if you have successful marketing campaigns it does not mean you will see an increase in sales. Marketing analytics enables you to look at the key metrics of your social channels against your competitors, giving you insight into how your brand awareness stacks up against theirs.

Once you have data about your brand awareness, you can look at search volumes, traffic, and what people are saying about your brand on social media. This data will help you create a strategy to improve your brand awareness and potentially place your business in a position of advantage.

7. Customer Acquisition Cost

Every customer has an acquisition cost after they move through the buyer's journey. It is important to understand the cost per customer to measure if the investments you made in those efforts were worth it. Measuring the cost of acquisition can be done by dividing your final campaign costs by the number of customers.

Marketing analytics programs are able to track the performance of your campaigns and marketing efforts to show you which ones have the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA). With this data, you can compare how your average CPA compares to the rest of the industry and create a strategy that helps you reach your goals and give your business an advantage.

How Sigma Empowers Marketers

Sigma helps Marketers maximize every marketing dollar spent by providing a complete view of campaign data. Bring all of your fragmented data together across billions of records and explore from a single point. Obtain clarity on the customer journey and how marketing channels are impacting your business.

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