You can’t have a clear marketing strategy without analyzing your marketing efforts. Data analytics is a significant piece of the puzzle that lets you see what’s going well and what you might need to improve.
Once you understand marketing analytics and how it helps your overall strategy, you can keep tailoring your marketing to reflect the needs of your ideal customers. This guide will give you the basics to get started.
What is Marketing Analytics, and Why is It Important?
Marketing analytics is the process of analyzing data and information about your marketing strategy to make positive changes. Marketing analytics can tell you how many people are visiting your landing pages or reading your emails, what your conversion rates are, and how well your pay-per-click (PPC) ads are driving visits and sales.
Of course, this data can also tell you the bad aspects of your marketing strategy, such as a low return on investment (ROI) or a high bounce rate from your site.
But the overall objective of this information is to help you better decide how to move forward with your marketing strategy. Marketing analytics typically uses several tools to monitor website, social media, advertising, and other traffic, to paint a detailed picture of how well your strategy is working.
Using Marketing Analytics to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
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Marketing analytics is advantageous to your business. With the right marketing strategy in place, you can see increased conversions, audience growth, and revenue.
Consider the following tips for using analytics to improve your marketing:
Use Reliable Analytics Tools
Analytics tools are widely available, and many of them are free. If you use social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, for business marketing, you can access analytics for those platforms in their dashboards. Depending on your website’s platform, you might also have analytics included for site traffic and other metrics.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free tools. It tracks just about every metric you need to determine whether your website marketing strategy is working as you expected. Install the Google Analytics dashboard from ShareThis to get an easy-to-use dashboard added to your WordPress site for free.
Other analytics tools work well for different purposes. For instance, HubSpot is excellent for tracking email and content marketing campaigns, while Sprout Social can monitor your performance across most social channels. In-depth tools like this come with fees, but their benefits for your marketing strategy may be well worth their costs.
Understand and Measure Your ROI
Analytics can give you insight into how much you’re making compared to the marketing costs you spend. This is your return on investment (ROI). Track this information for each of your campaigns on your social channels, website, email marketing, and whatever other avenues you use. It’ll help you determine whether your expenses are yielding the revenue results you expect. The less you spend to get more revenue, the better.
To find your ROI, you first need to figure out how much you spend on a specific campaign. Then, use data analytics tools to learn how many conversions your campaign has had and how much you’ve made from them. From there, you can determine how much you make versus how much you spend.
For example, let’s say you spent $5,000 for a copywriter to write a digital course. You’ve had 20 purchasers of that course in the first month. The course costs $800. So, you paid $5,000 but earned $16,000 in the initial month, giving you $11,000 in profit. If that course is something you’ll continue to sell, your ROI will continue to grow.
Define Marketing Objectives
Your marketing objectives inform what information you’ll track in analytics. Google Analytics and other tools have several metrics you can track, and you can create custom dashboards to display only the metrics you need.
Say you want to improve the conversions of a landing page. You’ll need to track metrics, such as traffic, bounce rate, and sign-ups, to determine how effective that landing page is at keeping people there and encouraging them to sign up. However, you may not need to track metrics like social media shares or customer lifetime value (CLV).
Marketing Analytics 101: Use Analytics to Test and Tweak Your Marketing
Marketing analytics is far from a one-time-use feature. You’ll consistently refer to your data to continue improving your marketing strategy. Lean on your analytics tools as you test and tweak your strategies and campaigns.
If you’re using marketing analytics, you’re collecting data about your website visitors. Both existing and emerging regulations require businesses to clearly inform consumers of what data they collect about them and how they use it. Stay compliant by creating a comprehensive, customized privacy policy with ShareThis’ Privacy Policy Generator—for free!
