Harnessing data analytics to drive marketing success

Creating a successful marketing campaign can seem like a dark art. Big budget graphics and witty straplines could help, but how do you know if your marketing efforts are really hitting the mark? and will they give you a return on your investment?

If you are serious about marketing, you need to be strategic. That means understanding what works and what doesn’t, and to do that you need customer data. Taking a data-driven approach can play a crucial role in developing effective marketing strategies.

Data analytics tools are advancing at pace and whatever your budget or size of your marketing campaign, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights on market trends, customer engagement and conversion rates that will help you plan for future marketing success and keep a competitive edge.

Benefits of data analytics in marketing

A good marketing strategy needs metrics to measure progress towards your goals. Data analytics supports this by providing insights that allow you to:

• Improve marketing decision making

• Increase return on investment (ROI)

• Personalise campaigns to enhance customer engagement and customer satisfaction

• Identify trends to help you stay ahead of the competition and develop new strategies, or adapt campaigns in real time to increase customer interactions.

Which metrics should you measure?

For any marketing campaign, you’ll need to decide what success looks like. For example, are you aiming to increase brand awareness, drive sales, or improve customer retention? Knowing the answer to this question will help you determine which metrics are going to help you most. Here are some examples of metrics that are worth measuring:

Audience behaviour metrics

• bounce rate

Customer experiences are important. If visitors to your website view only one page it can indicate issues with usability or content, and could be detrimental to business. If you have marketing messages on a website, bounce rate can indicate how effective they are in engaging your audience.

• click-through rate

How many people are clicking on a link in your ad or email, or visiting your e-commerce site? This can tell you a lot about the power of your messaging and call to action in engaging your target audience.

• engagement rate

The interaction that users have with your content, such as likes, comments, shares, and time spent on a page are important measures of how well your content resonates with your audience and can tell you a lot more than page visits or bounce rate can.

• conversion rate

Understanding your customers’ behaviours, and who takes action following engagement with your marketing is an important measure of success. Whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, it’s important to know if your campaign has successfully converted prospects into customers.

• email open rate

Knowing how many recipients read your emails will help you hone your email marketing strategy with pithy subject lines and calls to action.

Financial metrics

• customer acquisition cost 

If you add together marketing and sales cost, you can work out how much it is costing to acquire each new customer, helping you to evaluate the efficiency of your marketing spend.

• return on investment

Another important financial measure is the ratio of net profit to the total investment in a marketing campaign, providing data on how profitable your marketing efforts might be.

• customer lifetime value 

If you are selling goods or services you can use data analytics to predict the total revenue expected from a customer over their entire relationship with your business. This can help with budget allocation when it comes to investing in future marketing campaigns.

• cost per click

This metric will help you manage your paid advertising budget by giving you a measure of the amount you pay each time a user clicks on your online ad.

Social media metrics

From likes and shares to follower numbers, social media provides a wealth of data about who is engaging with your digital marketing and social media posts and whether they are converting to customers. 

You might also like to go beyond the basics and find out how your brand measures up against competitors by measuring your social share of voice (SOV). You can also use sentiment analysis to help you understand how your audience feels about your brand and products, helping to inform future marketing campaigns.

Six steps to making data work for you in marketing

Whatever measures you decide to use, there are several things to consider to ensure the data works for you to ensure business success.

1. Data collection

Automation has made data collection a breeze and the more data you collect, the deeper and broader your insights can be and the more informed your decision-making will become.

Marketers collect data from various sources, such as website traffic, social media interactions, email campaigns, and customer feedback. This data provides insights into consumer behaviour and preferences that can help inform marketing strategies in real-time and build future campaigns. 

2. Data analysis

Once collected, you can analyze data using statistical tools and software dashboards, to identify patterns and trends. This process helps in understanding what works and what doesn’t and whether particular marketing efforts have been worthwhile.

3. Audience segmentation

By creating customer segments based on demographics, behaviours, and interests, you’ll be able to design more targeted and personalised campaigns with customer preferences in mind, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

4. Predictive analytics

Data analytics can help you make marketing decisions in real time. In addition, predictive analytics can put historical data to good use to forecast future trends and behaviours and drive data-driven decision-making. This can help you to anticipate customer needs and adjust your strategies accordingly.

5. Performance tracking

To track performance, marketers use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of their campaigns. Common KPIs include conversion rates, click-through rates, and return on investment.

6. Optimisation

Data-driven insights allow you to optimize campaigns in real-time using a variety of data sources, from sentiment analysis to purchasing patterns. This might involve changing ad creatives, or reallocating budgets to target different channels.

Which analytical tools should you use?

Advanced analytics tools are now commonplace and the power of data analytics in driving marketing success has grown.

Having vast amounts of data at your fingertips is a game-changer. Free tools like Google analytics and the dashboards already embedded in your customer relationship management (CRM) software could be enough to get the insights you need to drive your marketing strategy.

Three types of data analytics are useful :

• Descriptive data analytics look at historical data to give a review of a past event that covers all the key facts and can help you better understand customer behaviours, conversion rates and campaign performance

• Predictive data analytics, which employ machine learning to identify trends, correlation, and causation can provide actionable insights that are invaluable in designing future campaigns

• Prescriptive data analytics predict outcomes and provide suggestions on a course of action that can help you develop new marketing strategies and make better, data-informed decisions.

Develop skills in data-driven marketing

If you are looking to develop your career in senior management with a focus on marketing, you might consider a 100% online MBA with marketing at Queen Margaret University. With a specialisation in marketing this MBA will help you develop skills in creating and implementing marketing strategies including digital and social media marketing.

The course is designed for busy working professionals and includes a range of taught modules and an independent research project on a topic of your choice. You’ll develop skills to help you better manage people, operations and projects as well as developing personal qualities including influencing skills, emotional intelligence and leadership.