Today, companies are collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data with the hope of creating an advantage over their competitors. Companies seek to learn more about their customers, goods and products, operations, and marketing. The landscape of how to collect, synthesize data, and make the data actionable is changing now more than ever and is rapidly advancing. 

When leveraged properly, data analytics can help companies understand their target audience, keep track of campaign performance, and make data-driven decisions to help their business grow.

Keep reading to learn about the impact of data analytics on marketing efforts and how you can improve your data practices to create more value for your organization.

Why Is Data Analytics Important in Marketing?

At their core, companies exist to provide valuable products or services in exchange for the value customers provide. Marketing helps your business facilitate that value exchange by creating moments of interaction that build interest and trust. But how do you know where and when to initiate those interactions?

Many marketers still rely on anecdotal evidence, well-known best practices, and instincts when creating campaigns and strategies. Often, these are somewhat effective. However, making changes to a strategy based on feelings and without proper tracking can make performance difficult to understand. It can also hinder the ability to hone in on exactly what is working and apply those factors to other marketing activities.

The best marketers combine their experience and know-how with the power of data. Data, when sourced and analyzed correctly, can provide insights into what is working and not working as it relates to your goals. For example, data can illustrate which channels are gaining the most engagement, or which content is converting the most prospects. As a result, marketing data analytics allows you to pivot and adjust your marketing strategy for improved performance.

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Benefits of Integrating Data Analytics into Marketing

To get the most out of data from your marketing campaigns, you need to integrate data analytics into your ongoing marketing activities. By tracking key types of data like customer engagement, email click-through rates, conversion rates, and more, you can better understand your customers. This, in turn, empowers you to make agile, data-driven marketing decisions in real time.

The benefits of analyzing data go beyond a single marketing channel. For example, if a blog is seen to attract significant organic traffic in Google Analytics, you might start promoting that blog on social media. You might also add a CTA to that blog from your marketing emails, or even use the content to develop an infographic, video, or other content asset. Now, your organic growth is complemented by an increase in social media followers and higher email engagement, leading to higher conversion rates overall.

By analyzing the performance of one marketing activity, marketing teams can build better campaigns across channels, leading to exponential data ROI. Let’s look at two real-world examples of data analytics in marketing to see how companies can benefit.

Red Hat

Red Hat wanted to leverage first-party data to improve its marketing impact. By implementing the Adobe Real-time CDP and using it to create audiences and targeted segments, they were able to drastically increase marketing personalization. This data also enabled Red Hat to more easily track performance across customer experiences, leading to a 3000% increase in ROI.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola uses data to get a clear picture of customer experiences across its hundreds of mobile apps and brand websites. Working with Further, Coca-Cola redefined its metric requirements and updated its enterprise analytics tools to allow regional owners to get valuable insights quickly. In doing so, Coca-Cola was able to create more accountability across brand owners, while reducing operational costs and the negative impact of poor customer experiences.

Key Steps to Making Data-Driven Decisions in Marketing

Getting started with data analytics in marketing can be intimidating. That’s why many companies choose to partner with a data analytics consulting firm. Data analytics services offer deep expertise in data strategy, combined with powerful technology. They leverage techniques like predictive analytics, and data visualization tools to enable you to make informed decisions about your digital marketing efforts.

However, there are steps you can take on your own to improve your company’s data analytics processes. 

Create a Hypothesis

First, you’ll want to define the value exchange between your company and its customers. Then, you’ll want to identify the goals you want to achieve using analytics. To create your roadmap to success, you’ll need a baseline, a snapshot of your current state. This may involve using competitive research, user activity tracking, and historical performance to analyze existing campaign performance and identify key trends and patterns. 

If you aren’t already collecting data from sources like Google Analytics, you’ll need to gather and organize your data. You’ll want to consider the channels and types of data that are important to your marketing team and ensure you have the proper data governance processes in place to keep from being overwhelmed.

To get the best results, you need to make sure that your data is accurate and up to date. 

You might also want to implement a customer data platform (CDP) to help you gather and analyze your data more quickly.

You’ll want to look at the data in a holistic way to see where your target audience is engaging most, when, and with what content. With this knowledge, you can make marketing efforts that are more targeted and effective. Depending on your findings, you may want to go back to your goals and make sure they are still the right ones!

Test It Out

Now that you have goals and a marketing hypothesis on how to get there, you’ll need to put a few milestones in place before testing your new strategy. For each test, you’ll need to define a success benchmark, target audience, channel(s), messaging, and the data points you will collect. 

During the test, you’ll need to collect all the relevant data. By keeping an eye on key metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates, you can quickly see which campaigns are working and which ones need improvement. Make sure to note any unexpected outcomes or anomalies which may impact your decisions later on.

Measure Your Success

After each hypothesis you test, you’ll need to measure and analyze its performance based on the metrics and goals you set out. For advanced data analytics in marketing, you might leverage machine learning predictive analysis techniques. But if you’re just starting out, data visualization tools like those found in Google Analytics and Google Looker Studio can make campaign performance easier to understand.

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By comparing your test results to your baseline data, you can identify which aspects of your campaign contributed to changes in performance. While surely you’d like every test to show positive results, even negative results can help your marketing team hone in on the right strategy.

It’s important to note that these steps shouldn’t be taken in a straight line. Instead, treat data analytics in marketing as a cycle, where each test provides the insights you need for the next hypothesis to build on. As your analytics prowess grows, you can have multiple tests happening simultaneously, across different channels or segments. When you have a truly data-driven culture, you can transform your practices from reactive to proactive across marketing activities to consistently grow your ROI.

Take Your Data Analytics Further

Even if you are implementing marketing data analytics across your campaigns, there are still ways to increase the effectiveness of your data strategy. Working with a data analytics consulting firm like Further, you can ensure your data analytics are supported by an optimized measurement framework, advanced machine-learning and AI tools, and privacy-first data sourcing. 

Our approach aligns your business goals with a data ecosystem that evolves based on your needs. Through continuous iteration and innovation, Further helps your marketing team make data-informed decisions that create measurable business value.

To see how Further can help you Own the Unknown™, schedule a call with us today.