Marketing analytics offers far more than improved insight into how your marketing programs are performing. While these more simplistic analyses shouldn’t be discounted, since your organization can gain incredible value through maximized effectiveness and return on investment, they shouldn’t be the sole focus either. When taken a step further, marketing analytics can offer a wealth of information about customer preferences, current and future trends in your industry, what your competitors are doing, and more.
You’re likely already familiar with some of the basic marketing measurements. These would be business metrics, which tell the big picture of ROI; conversion metrics, which tell you how well you’re turning potential customers into actual customers and the cost of conversion; and marketing metrics, which tell you whether you’re able to gain and engage new potential customers. You can monitor campaigns and analyze their respective outcomes, you can identify critical search keywords, and you can measure yourself against your competitors. With these abilities, you can better determine whether your resources are allocated effectively and what priorities to tackle next.
By incorporating digital marketing analytics and social media analytics into your overall marketing analytics strategy, you unlock a wealth of additional data that can provide significantly greater ability to report on the past, analyze the present, and predict the future. Much of this comes through a greater understanding of your customers. Consumer behavior is complex and often seemingly inexplicable. So, one can pretty easily imagine how gaining the ability to listen to what people are saying online and to learn from what they’re saying is quite valuable.
Once you delve into the world of social media analytics, it’s important to understand that nearly every social platform has proprietary analytics tools. Here are a few of the key players and what their particular tool is called:
- Twitter = Twitter Analytics
- Facebook = Insights tab on your business’ page
- Instagram = Facebook Insights platform
- LinkedIn = Analytics tab on your business’ page
- YouTube = YouTube Analytics Dashboard
On top of social media analytics, there are several other broad categories of marketing analytics tools. These include:
- Web Analytics – tools like Google Analytics let you track user activity on your website
- Visual Behavior and Testing – track how your users interact with your website
- SEO Analytics – track what consumers search for
- Content Analytics – help keep you up to date on competitor and industry content
- Email Analytics – delve into email marketing campaigns
As you pore over the metrics and measurements available in each of these tools, it can be difficult to determine what is actually valuable. Part of your organization’s marketing strategy needs to involve clearly defining objectives and goals. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve will help identify what you need to measure. For example, if you’re trying to raise brand awareness, then impressions would be the most important, if you want to build a community, then engagement would be the most important, and if you want more users to make it to your website, then traffic and conversions are what matter. Some other valuable KPIs might be sales per session or a more detailed view of your sales funnel – are you only measuring conversion or are you capturing how customers interact with each page like viewing products and adding them to their shopping cart?
Hopefully, this post has illustrated the fact that marketing analytics is not a simple field and the introduction of any number of different data science tools and techniques can yield a tremendous advantage. So, whether you’re starting from zero and need to develop and implement an entire marketing analytics strategy or you’re looking for incremental improvement of your existing processes to maintain a competitive edge, it’s always helpful to advance your knowledge with outside resources.
In addition to social media analytics, Syntelli has broad experience helping companies with marketing mix optimization, attribution modeling, customer segmentation, and other facets of a digital marketing analytics strategy.
There’s a wealth of additional information out there, from broad topics to nuanced details, and you can spend countless hours browsing the web or quickly and easily reach out to us to help your organization realize these benefits.
