The rise of data-driven businesses has made it necessary for anyone who wants to succeed to utilize analytics tools. No area of business is exempt from requiring data to drive decisions, but marketing is the ultimate place where analytics can be used to their fullest potential.
However, the issue that persists is that businesses have no idea how to utilize the enormous amounts of data now at their disposal. Here are a few ways you can begin to structure your marketing department around analytics, and vice versa.
1. Find your strategy
There are countless possible approaches for utilizing analytics within a business, many of which could be a good fit for you and all of which can provide different benefits. That’s why it’s important to become familiar with the various methods and tools out there, such as a converged policy, and evaluate each one to see which one fulfills your business needs the best.
For example, an RCQ (reach, cost, quality) approach evaluates the number of consumers reached, the cost per touchpoint, and the quality of the final engagement with the consumer. It’s a good approach for when there is limited data, whereas an MMM (marketing-mix modeling) approach utilizes large amounts of data. You can already see how businesses with different volumes of available data might want to use one of these methods over the other.
2. Create a benchmark
For a marketing analytics campaign to be successful, you need to establish parameters for what you want to improve or change and what your end goal is. This will help you to be able to identify whether or not your analytics process has achieved what you set out to do. Seeing random increases in clicks, for instance, may not indicate that your overall brand awareness has risen, and if that’s what you intended to do you’ll need to find other ways of identifying that. Having the analysis doesn’t guarantee that you’ll understand what the numbers are telling you, so it’s important to establish those parameters ahead of time.
3. Hire an analytics manager
Because the world of marketing analytics has become so involved and specialized, it’s a good idea to hire an analytics manager to ensure that you’re using your data to its full potential. A good analyst is someone who is experienced in evaluating and interpreting large data sets and can turn those insights into concrete recommendations for marketing campaigns. Their insights and recommendations should reflect weaknesses in current campaigns, making it easy to see improvements.
A marketing analytics manager should also be on top of current marketing trends and be very comfortable using any of the analytics tools you’ve determined are a good fit for your business strategy. Lastly, they should be able to condense their insights and proposed changes into a compelling narrative for stakeholders. It should be easy for anyone involved to see how these changes are going to improve marketing strategy overall.
4. Know the challenges
There are many reasons why not every business has become an enormous success after integrating marketing analytics into its business model. From a large quantity of data that is essentially useless due to poor quality to the overall lack of data scientists, the world of data analysis is far from fully functional. And deciding on the right data model can be extremely difficult, depending on how your business is structured. In addition, most B2B or B2C businesses have had to take a hybrid approach to sales and engagement, meaning the data is coming from both online interactions and real-world situations, making it difficult to correlate data across all business practices.
Conclusion
The process of embarking on data analytics can be really expensive, so deciding to go down this road is quite a gamble for many businesses. But don’t let the possible obstacles prevent you from looking into utilizing data analytics for your marketing department. While there are possible setbacks, after taking the time to assess the risks and do your research, the benefits of a successful analytics campaign far outweigh the costs.
