Measuring the effectiveness of marketing activities is a challenge every business faces. Especially if your business is investing in both offline and online marketing activities, keeping a track of performance of these activities becomes all more challenging. Platforms like Google Analytics have made tracking the web analytics a lot simpler. However, businesses need a lot more data than what such platforms present to track your marketing efforts the right way. Marketing Analytics are often used to track such data points which provide more information to analyze the marketing efforts of a business. Before we dig into details on Marketing Analytics, it is important to understand the difference between web analytics and marketing analytics.
Web Analytics: A web analytics tool is used to record and analyze the activity on your website. These tools measure metrics such as load times, number of visitors and unique visitors browsing your website, pages per visit, time spent on the site, conversions and goals defined by you.
Marketing Analytics: Marketing Analytics, on the other hand, measure business metrics such as total leads and sales generated, traffic generated on a website due to offline activities, impact of other marketing activities such as email marketing, social media etc.
As a comparison, if you run an email campaign, your web analytics will give you details on the traffic it was able to generate for your website. However, to analyze the effectiveness of the email campaign, you need details like bounce rates, open rates, click through rates and several other metrics which web analytics cannot track. These metrics would be tracked within your marketing analytic platform.
So, once you identify the need for marketing analytics, it is important to define a roadmap on how you want to define and track your marketing metrics.
SWOT and Competitor Analysis
The first step is to perform a SWOT analysis of your business to determine where exactly you stand in terms of your marketing success vis-à-vis others within your industry. Also perform competitor analysis to analyze where your competition is investing in terms of marketing. This helps you to identify the marketing opportunities you might be missing or take cues on how you can improve your marketing campaigns. This effort would also help you to identify any new lead generation avenues which you might have missed but your competition identified.
Identify Marketing Activities
Once you review your business and have identified the opportunities, it is important to pinpoint and prioritize your various marketing activities. Always remember that there is no customer marketing plan which works for every business. The marketing needs of every business is unique and the marketing solutions should also be designed understanding your business needs. Choose the marketing activities which works best for you based on your customer segmentation. Design an integrated marketing plan and prioritize your marketing activities.
Choose the Right Tools
In order to execute your plan successfully, you will need to choose the right resources and tools. Identify suitable platforms and software solutions which can help you execute your marketing plan successfully and also track your important performance metrics. As part of the exercise, evaluate your existing resources to identify the ones which are useful and the ones which are not. Lack of relevant resources and tools can often act as a barrier to the success of your initiative by hindering execution and tracking of marketing activities.
Understand the KPIs
Once you have identified the marketing activities you want to invest in, define the parameters to measure the performance of these activities. The KPIs you define should not just translate to numbers, they should translate to decision making. They should speak for themselves and should be understood easily by all the departments involved in the decision making process. For example, your metrics should track the ROI of all the marketing channel, conversions per channel, life time value of customer through various channels etc.
Let the Analytics Decide Your Next Campaign
Analyzing, tracking, continually learning and taking action on the learnings is the key to success for marketing activities. To accomplish this, you need many data points to define the parameters to track your marketing activities. Marketing analytics are built around this concept and help you in measuring the marketing performance both on individual channels and also analyze the impact of cross- channel marketing. Ultimately, effective use of marketing analytics yields a positive synergistic cycle that leads to an increasingly effective marketing capacity within your business and an increasing ROI for marketing spend.
The real indicator of the successful implementation of marketing analytics is the way you make your next decision. If the marketing analytics are well defined and tracked, they will guide you in your decision making process. Identifying the channels that work, seasonality in various channels and various other parameters help you to identify the marketing activities and channels that work best for you. Marketing analytics can help you in tracking all such parameters and provide a logical conclusion to your existing marketing campaigns and also provide insights for your next campaign.
