Improving Your Campaign Efforts with Marketing Analytics

Leading companies have proven time and time again that improving the performance of their marketing campaigns is accomplished through actionable marketing analytics. It’s no longer a secret: If you want to boost performance, increase efficiency and drive company revenue you must be measuring your results. Working with data on a daily basis means having a great sense of what you have accomplished. And not only do analytics give you an idea of how you’re doing, but they also providing information on what right, and what you’re doing wrong.

So what is Marketing Analytics, exactly?

Analytics exist in order to measure and optimize your marketing activities. Rather than focusing on one area, like your website, marketing analytics allow you to focus on all your efforts – from email, to webinars, to social media and drip campaigns. Essentially, it takes a big picture, multi-channel approach to measuring all of your marketing efforts.

It may seem simple, and you could assume, but the reality is that many marketers don’t go beyond looking at the outcomes of their efforts. They don’t analyze the way they’ve executed a campaign. Like what time of day was the most effective in customer engagement, and which channel was used to achieve this. How about conversations that have happened on the phone, or engagement in real life? Marketing analytics go beyond looking at website activities and allow marketers to ask “What did my marketing campaign actually achieve?”

Analytics give us the ability to gather insight on where to invest further. It gives us priorities. How should I spend my time? How should I build out my team? Am I investing resources into the right channels?

Where should I get started?

There is definitely a learning curve when it comes to approaching analytics. You need to learn about how your marketing activities are performing. Most marketers have this part figured out. However, the focus is more on how you are performing right now. But with marketing analytics, you can gain a wider scope into how past campaigns performed compared to current campaigns in order to know which to duplicate and which to discard.

Beyond reporting visitor counts and time on site, you should be focusing on the results that happened offsite. Less traditional KPIs include conversations, comments, likes and shares. If you want to create a holistic marketing strategy, marketing analytics will help you figure out what marketing resources to invest in.

Making decisions with marketing analytics

By testing and spending time on figuring out which efforts yield the best results, we can form decisions about future campaigns. Instead of assuming some channels work – or some channels aren’t going to work, marketing analytics gives you the kind of insight that you can use in order to make informed decisions about future campaigns.