On average, business owners in the United States spend over $21 billion on marketing campaigns every year. Finding the right professionals to help you accomplish your marketing goals is imperative. Making sure that the campaigns you are spending money on generate a great return should be one of your main concerns. Reputable and trustworthy marketing agencies will go out of their way to reassure their clients.
This is why the best marketing agencies gather various metrics and submit reports to their clients on a regular basis. As you start to look for a marketing agency to hire, you need to make sure they take analytics and reporting seriously. Below we will discuss the importance of marketing analytics and how the data you collect can be used to optimize current and future marketing campaigns.
What Are Marketing Analytics?
The term marketing analytics is used to describe the study or use of data related to a company’s marketing campaigns. Businesses and marketing agencies use these analytics to determine the success of past marketing campaigns, customer behavior, and consumers’ preferences. When broken down in an easy-to-understand way, marketing analytics can help a business recognize patterns and trends they can capitalize on.
Business owners also use marketing analytics to optimize resource allocation, campaign planning and the various marketing activities they are engaged in. Generally, the marketing analytics a business owner will be presented with are as follows.
Reports Of Past Marketing Campaigns
When a particular marketing campaign comes to a close, it is important to understand what elements worked. You also need to know what parts of a past marketing strategy didn’t quite pan out. The best way to get this information is by collecting marketing analytics. The metrics gathered from past marketing campaigns should include things like sales funnel churn rate, lead conversion and the lifetime value of customers.
Analyzing Current Marketing Campaigns
Assessing the success of current marketing campaigns is also important. A marketing agency will use data collected from past campaigns to figure out how well a current campaign is stacking up. Getting a clear picture of how well marketing materials are being received by a company’s target demographic is vital. When assessing the success of a current marketing campaign, agencies will look at things like website traffic, engagement on social media, click-through rates and rise in revenue.
Making Predictions For The Future
Many marketing professionals rely on analytics to help them plan for future campaigns. The data collected from consumers is used for things like targeted content distribution and lead scoring. If a business owner has data regarding how well a particular marketing approach has worked in the past, they can confidently incorporate it into their future campaigns.
The Importance of Marketing Analytics
Before you invest money into a new marketing campaign, you need to figure out how to hedge your bets. Rather than making assumptions about what your target audience wants, you can remove uncertainty from the marketing campaign development process with the help of analytics.
With the right analytics, a business owner can figure out what type of content to produce, what channels to use when distributing it, and what their target customer wants to hear. Having this information allows business owners to optimize the success of their marketing campaigns and reduce the risk of wasteful spending. This is why you need to work with a marketing agency that is adamant about using analytics and data.
How Analytics Help You Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns
Allowing professionals to plan and carry out your marketing campaigns is a great way to avoid mistakes. Marketing professionals can use analytics to optimize the campaigns they create for their clients. The number of actions that can be taken with marketing analytics is virtually impossible. Here are some of the ways marketing professionals use analytics to help their clients.
Selecting the Right Keywords
If you are new to the world of content marketing, you might be unaware of the importance of keywords. When a person uses a search engine, they will enter a query that contains certain keywords. If these keywords are found in the content on your website, it will show up on the search engine results page. Determining the specific keywords and phrases to use in your content is harder than you probably realize.
Experienced marketing professionals use the power of analytics to help them choose the right keywords to embed in their client’s content. There are a number of analytic software programs on the market that professionals use to find the right keywords for the campaigns they are creating.
Predicting Customer Needs and Purchase Preferences
Selling products/services to online consumers is not easy. Figuring out how to approach interested consumers with your marketing message is crucial when trying to win them over. Luckily, analytics can help you figure this information out.
Collecting data about things like purchase history, consumer behavior and the customer journey helps marketing professionals. With this data, businesses are able to predict their customer’s needs and figure out their purchasing preferences.
Easily Replicate Successful Marketing Campaigns
Knowing the type of content your target audience responds to is extremely important. This is why collecting data and analytics about your customers is something you should view as a priority. Many social media platforms have analytic dashboards business owners can access. By accessing the analytics on these social media platforms, you can see what type of content or topics your followers respond to.
Once you have this information, you can start creating more of this content. Doing this will help you keep customer engagement levels high. Better content can also help you drive new traffic to your website.
New Market Engagement
Finding ways to expand your online reach is crucial if you want to grow your business. Developing marketing campaigns designed to target a new audience is a great way to boost your online reach. However, you will need to collect data and analytics to find out how successful these new campaigns are. By seeing how well your campaigns are connecting with a new audience, you can optimize them to accomplish your goals.
Marketing Analytic Concepts You Need to Get Familiar With
There are a number of concepts within marketing analytics that you need to familiarize yourself with. These concepts can help you maximize things like the allocation of resources and your marketing efforts. By educating yourself about these concepts, you can develop campaigns that actually excel.
Lead To Customer Conversion Rate
Lead to customer conversion rate is a term used to describe the percentage of leads that turned into actual sales. Having this information allows marketing professionals to produce content that generates a specific type of leads. Generally, these leads will have a higher chance of converting into actual sales, which is why monitoring this metric is so vital.
The Lifetime Value of a Customer
Tracking things like the past purchases and purchasing frequency of each of your customers is important. Knowing this information and the average customer lifespan will allow you to develop a profile of the lifetime value of your customers. Marketing professionals can also use this data to predict future customer engagement and the possible return on a company’s marketing investment.
Cost Per Lead
Most business owners are passionate about creating successful and cost-effective marketing campaigns. With the help of data and analytics, you can assess how much each sales lead generated with a marketing campaign actually costs. Having an accurate cost per lead number is crucial when trying to figure out the actual return on your marketing investment.
Return On Investment
The revenue growth generated by certain marketing activities is referred to as return on investment (ROI). The last thing you want is to lose money on your marketing campaigns. This is why tracking your ROI is vital in the long-term financial success of your business.
Insist On Receiving Marketing Analytics Reports
As you can see, there are a number of advantages that come with using marketing analytics. If you are looking for professional help with your marketing campaigns, then you need to find out more about the reports you will receive from an agency. You need to insist on receiving marketing analytic reports because it helps you figure out how well they are doing. If an agency seems hesitant about generating these reports, you need to view this as a big red flag.
A knowledgeable and trustworthy marketing agency should have no problem generating these reports a few times a year. Going over these reports in detail with your point person at the marketing agency will help you understand what these analytics mean and how close you are to accomplishing your marketing goals.
If you want to get a great return on your marketing investment, you have to realize how important analytics is. By collecting the right type of data from your target audience, you can create campaigns that produce lots of sales leads. These high-value sales leads will allow you to boost your bottom line and grow your online reach.