What you need to know about marketing analytics

Marketing teams need to be able to measure and analyze their marketing campaigns. After all, what’s the point of spending all that time and money on marketing if you don’t even know if it’s working?

Nowadays, marketing teams have to manage their campaigns through tons of different tools and services. For instance, they have to manage their search ads through Google Ads or another service, their social media outreach through their social media’s analytical tool, and so on.

But what if you want to take things a step further and get real insights into your marketing campaigns? That’s where business intelligence comes in.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and reporting on data to help businesses make better decisions.

In the context of marketing, BI can be used to measure and analyze a variety of data points, such as website traffic, social media engagement, lead generation, and more.

A BI tool can connect to different services and software, collect all your data from them, and then store that data in one centralized location. From there, the data can be combined, analyzed, and visualized together, allowing for a far more holistic view of business data.

With BI, businesses can see how different marketing channels are performing relative to each other, identify areas where they need to improve, and so on. For example, you can combine the data from your Google Ads account with your social media analytics to get a unified view of your digital marketing strategy.

Overall, BI is an essential tool for any business that wants to make data-driven decisions about its marketing campaigns.

The need for data-driven marketing

In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s more important than ever for businesses to be data-driven in their decision-making. That’s because the decisions you make about your marketing campaigns can have a big impact on your bottom line.

For instance, if you’re not tracking your website traffic, you can’t know if your web-based marketing campaigns are actually driving results. And if you’re not using BI to analyze your data, you could be making decisions based on gut feelings or guesswork rather than actual insights.

Data-driven marketing is all about making decisions based on data and analytics rather than intuition or guesswork. By using BI to analyze your marketing data, you can get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not and make decisions accordingly.

Some use cases for marketing analytics

There are a few situations where marketing analytics can be extremely helpful. Every business should be aware of these situations. Here are some of the most important ones:

Website analytics

Your website is one of your most essential marketing tools, so tracking how people interact with it is important.

Website analytics can give you information like how many people are visiting your site, how long they’re staying on each page, what kind of device they’re using, and what led them to your site in the first place. You can then use this information to improve your website design, content, and overall user experience.

For example, let’s say you see that many people are leaving your site after they land on your pricing page. This could be a sign that your pricing is too high or that your pricing page isn’t clear enough.

In either case, it would be worth doing some further research to figure out the root cause of the problem and then making some changes to address it.

Marketing campaign analytics

It’s also essential to track how well your marketing campaigns perform.

Are people interacting with your ads? Are they clicking through to your website? Are they signing up for your email list?

By tracking these data points, you’ll see which campaigns are worth continuing and which need to be tweaked or even scrapped altogether. With real-time data tracking, you can even track campaign success mid-campaign.

Imagine that you’re running a Facebook ad campaign and notice that people click through to your website but immediately bounce off again. This could mean that something on your website isn’t working well or that the ad itself wasn’t relevant to what people were looking for.

In either case, it would be worth taking a closer look at the campaign and making some changes.

Marketing dashboards

Lastly, a marketing dashboard is one of the most important marketing team tools.

A marketing dashboard pulls together your marketing data from different sources into one place so you can see everything at a glance. This is helpful for quickly identifying patterns and trends. It would be much more challenging to make informed decisions about your marketing without the ability to bring all your data together in one place.

One example of a marketing dashboard is one that marketing teams can use to track their website traffic, social media metrics, and email campaign performance all in one place. This way, they can quickly see how each of these channels is performing and identify any areas that need improvement.

This is much better than the alternative, which is comparing the data from these different data sources manually.

There are several different software options for setting up BI dashboards. The key is finding a tool that harnesses the data you already have and presents it in an easy-to-understand way.

The benefits of data-driven marketing

There are many benefits to making decisions based on data rather than intuition or guesswork. Here are some of the biggest ones:

You can track your progress and see what’s working

One of the benefits of data-driven marketing is that you can track your progress and see what’s working. This way, you can continually improve your marketing efforts and get better results over time.

This type of tracking also allows you to measure the return on investment for your marketing activities. By comparing the amount of money you’ve spent on marketing with the amount of revenue it’s generated, you can determine which activities are worth continuing and which ones aren’t worth the investment.

You can make more informed decisions

Making decisions based on data rather than intuition or guesswork allows you to be more strategic with your marketing efforts. You can target your efforts towards areas most likely to be successful rather than wasting time and money on strategies that don’t work.

You can respond more quickly to changes

The marketing world is constantly changing, and it’s essential to react quickly to new trends and changes in the industry. Data-driven marketing allows you to do this by clearly showing what’s working and what isn’t. This way, you can quickly change your strategy in response to new developments.

You can compete more effectively

In today’s competitive market, it’s essential to have a well-thought-out marketing strategy if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

Data-driven marketing allows you to do this by helping you understand your customers better and figure out what appeals to them. And by making decisions based on data, you can be sure that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

How to get started with data-driven marketing

If you’re interested in getting started with data-driven marketing, there are a few things you can do to get started.

Collect data from every customer or client interaction

One of the first steps is to start collecting data from every interaction. This data can come from sources like your website analytics, social media analytics, email marketing campaigns, and surveys.

Use data to segment your audience

Once you’ve collected enough data, you can start using it to segment your audience. This involves dividing your customer base into groups based on shared characteristics.

Target your marketing efforts

After you’ve segmented your audience, you can start targeting your marketing efforts. This means using the data you’ve collected to create marketing campaigns that are tailored to each audience segment.

Analyze your results

Finally, once you’ve started implementing data-driven marketing, it’s important to analyze your results. This will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t and allow you to make necessary adjustments to your strategy.

Rinse and repeat

Data-driven marketing is ongoing, so it’s important to keep collecting data and analyze your results regularly. By continually fine-tuning your strategy, you can be sure that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

Learn how to use marketing data in new ways

There’s a lot more to marketing than just creating ads and driving traffic to your website. To be truly successful, you need to be able to track and analyze your progress along the way.

Luckily, modern tools are available to help you do that. By understanding which metrics matter and using them effectively, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your marketing goals.

One of the best ways to make data-driven decisions is to use a cloud-based, self-service BI platform.

A cloud-based platform makes it easy to collect, prepare, and visualize your data. With a BI tool, you can create custom dashboards to track any metric you want, including website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, and more. Plus, BI tools make it easy to share your dashboards with your team, so everyone is on the same page.