In the late 1800s, John Wanamaker said that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted.
Marketing analytics is confusing, but now you can finally get started with the exact kind of marketing analytics you need.
Marketing analytics helps marketers make data-informed decisions.
A sub-discipline of business analytics, marketing analytics asks questions about audience segments, marketing channels, copy, creatives, and cost to acquire new customers.
To convince your boss or board to pay attention to marketing analytics, you need three kinds of data.
The very thing you’ll want to open with is the fact that data-driven businesses are more profitable than businesses without data-driven strategies.
If your stakeholders understand the benefits of becoming data-driven, you should use this 4-stage maturity model to explain your current state and aspirations.
You need to convince your stakeholders that now is the right time to act on marketing analytics.
In order to prove the value of marketing, you should care about marketing analytics.
Attribution modeling helps to determine which touchpoints your customers go through before becoming customers.
Marketing analytics will help you decide if you need to hire for new roles or if you want to evaluate which marketing tactics work best.
Marketing analytics will help you improve your ad campaigns and increase your conversions by switching to the highest performing variants.
Predictive marketing analytics is becoming increasingly common in more data mature businesses, and your team should be aware of the many benefits it can provide.
Let’s say you get the green light to start ramping up the company’s marketing analytics capabilities.
To influence the culture around marketing analytics and the way your marketing team uses data, first you’ll want to share your vision, convince everyone to use more data, and train them on the necessary areas of marketing analytics.
As soon as you’ve started mapping out the skills that your team needs, it’s time to start training existing team members, getting help from elsewhere in the organization, or hiring new people.
The people in the marketing team should know how to formulate good research questions, track their own activities, report results, visualize data, and perform simple ad hoc analysis.
In a hybrid model, the marketing team reports to both the marketing lead and the head of data/analytics.
To get the marketing insights you need, you’ll need to develop your process based on your team structure.
If the marketing team and the analytics team are working together, the process is different.
Choose data sources to analyze. For example, if you are analyzing customer data, you can choose from ecommerce platform transactional sales data, marketing automation or email data, advertising data, and organic social media data.
Now that you know how to analyze data, choose technologies that will help your team get the job done.
A data warehouse, business intelligence tool, visualization tool, and a spreadsheet tool are required to make sense of your marketing, sales, and business data.
After you’ve set up a tailored data infrastructure, you should follow a basic marketing analytics process.
In order to make sense of your data, you need to start by asking why campaign A outperforms campaign B.
The two campaigns were targeting the same audience, had similar goals, and used the same promotion channels, but only the campaign with more promotion budget outperformed the other.
The next step is to collect all the possible data points that could have impacted your second webinar’s poor performance.
If you analyze your data points, you notice that the first webinar was more successful than the second one because the first webinar was organized on a holiday, like the US Independence Day.
If you want to learn from your webinar analytics, document your learnings and apply them.
The hypothesis that webinar A outperformed webinar B is typically inconclusive.
You can’t mitigate the effect of external variables, but you can validate your findings and adjust goals if necessary based on historical data.
If you’re struggling with marketing analytics, it’s probably the business and/or marketing side you should brush up on. If you want to learn technical skills like Excel formulas or SQL, it’s the data and analytics side you should learn more about.
To master the data, analytics, and technical side of marketing, you should be familiar with the business and what insights you can glean from data.
To get your team leveling up in marketing analytics, you’ll need to drive cultural change, skills gap closure, organizational change and access to the right data and technology.