Analytics

The new marketing channels and technologies appearing everyday force marketers to adapt quickly to evolve analytics strategies, skills, and solutions to survive in a crowded market. As data becomes increasingly critical for informed decision-making, marketers and their organizations will find themselves along a long spectrum of analytical maturity. The first step is to establish where your marketing organization’s analytics are today in order to progress tomorrow and thrive in the future.

Marketing analytics is the study of data garnered through marketing campaigns in order to discern patterns between such things as how a campaign contributed to conversions, consumer behaviour, regional preferences, creative preferences and much more. The goal of marketing analytics is to use these patterns and findings to optimize future campaigns based on what was successful and what wasn’t.

Marketing analytics benefits both marketers and consumers. This analysis allows marketers to achieve higher ROI on marketing investments by understanding what is successful in driving either conversions, brand awareness, or both.  Analytics also ensures that consumers see a greater number of targeted, personalized ads that speak to their specific needs and interests, rather than mass communications that tend to annoy.

Marketing data can be analysed using a variety of methods and models depending on the KPIs being measured. It is important to remember that analysis of brand awareness relies upon different data and models than analysis of conversions.

Some popular analytics models include:

Media Mix Models (MMM): Attribution models that look at aggregate data over a long period of time.

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): Attribution models that provide person-level data from across the buyer’s journey.

Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM): A form of measurement that integrates various attribution models including MMM and MTA into comprehensive engagement metrics.

The Importance of Marketing Analytics

In the modern marketing landscape, accurate analytics is more important than ever. Consumers have often become highly selective in choosing the branded media they engage with and the media they ignore. This forces marketing teams to look for the ways to serve the right ad, at the right time, on the right channel to move consumers down the sales funnel.

How Organizations Can Use Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics data can help your business make decisions on matters including product updates, branding and more. It’s important to take data from multiple sources (online and offline) to prevent a fragmented view.

Using this data, your team can gain insights into the following:

• Product Intelligence by taking a deep dive into the brand’s products as well as how those products stack up within the market.
• Customer Trends and Preferences, what messaging / creative resonates with them? Which products are they buying and which have they researched in the past? Which ads are leading to conversions and which are ignored?
• Product Development Trends established by analytics offer insight into the types of product features consumers want.  
• Customer Support areas can be found with use of analytics and lead simplifying or improving the buyers journey.
• Messaging and Media and if marketers choose to display messages for particular consumers in the right channels. This has become especially important because of the sheer number of those channels.
• Competition, how you compare with your competitors and what needs to be done to close that gap if there is one.
• Predict Future Results having understood why a campaign worked.

The Challenges of Analysing Data

The quantity of data means that marketers must determine how to best organize the data into a digestible format to derive actionable insights. Some of the challenges here include:

• Data Quantity
• Data Quality
• Lack of Data Scientists
• Selecting Attribution Models
• Correlating Data 

Marketing Analytics Software

Marketing analytics software combats the above challenges by collecting, organizing and correlating valuable data quickly, allowing marketers to make real-time campaign optimizations. They are valuable for the speed at which they can store and process massive amounts of data. Additionally, many platforms now leverage unified marketing measurement, to normalize and aggregate marketing data from across various channels and campaigns, simplifying analysis. In the end, advanced analytics platforms go beyond measuring consumer engagements to offer insights into brand equity and how certain audience segments react to creative elements. This helps marketers better determine brand-building ROI, as well as how to further personalize branded experiences.

BMF Design will help you organize the data you need to collect and make sure that your organization has a wholistic view of which campaigns are successful and which are underperforming in real time. Deployment of Marketing Analytics Tools will be tailored to the existing KPIs and strategy objectives as well as help to craft the messages that will resonate with customers and to find the right channels to place them.