If you’re looking into deeper research of your marketing data for the first time, you’ll have more questions than just how to interpret the metrics:
- Do you go over previous campaign results?
- What should you be looking at right now?
- How do you ensure that your efforts have the biggest possible impact on future performance?
Addressing these questions can assist you in telling a compelling story to organizational decision-makers, improving your marketing efforts, and anticipating future trends. This may appear to be a difficult task, but we’re here to show you how.
Here’s a five-step strategy for successfully evaluating marketing data using technology, complete with Gartner insights, survey data, and actionable advice to get you started.
Table of Contents
Different Types of Analysing Marketing Data
Marketing data arrives in a variety of formats, and understanding the distinctions is critical. The following are the three main forms of marketing data:
- Descriptive Analytics: This method identifies patterns, trends, and correlations between variables by analyzing current and historical data. This information is utilized to generate traffic and engagement reports as well as acquire insight into consumer demand trends affecting your target demographic.
- Predictive analytics is a technique that employs market research to forecast future marketing trends and scenarios, and it is frequently used for lead scoring and audience segmentation. It can also be used to calculate client lifetime value with the use of machine learning (CLTV).
- Prescriptive Analytics: Unlike predictive analytics, which predicts the future based on historical data, prescriptive analytics suggests actions you should take to influence those future results.
- The core of our process is knowing the fundamentals of what data you’re collecting and its practical use. Now, let’s go over the remaining steps so you can get the most out of that data.
Step 1: Identify the most critical key performance metrics (KPIs)
You can have all the data you want, but what good is it if you’re not focused on the proper KPIs? When it comes to your marketing objectives, your data will fail to create a compelling tale. Furthermore, focusing on certain KPIs helps as a guidepost for your daily marketing activities. When you’re working towards a few specific goals, it’s easy to see how far you’ve come.
Tracking clicks to a donation landing page from your various marketing channels, for example, is an ideal major KPI for a nonprofit seeking to improve overall donations. Tracking interaction and emotion around promotional content is a good alternative if you’re introducing a new product or service.
In any case, select 1-3 key KPIs that speak directly to your business objectives. Aside from that, make sure your objectives are Detailed, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Step 2: Investigate your data
To improve your usage of data analytics, you must first evaluate what data you presently gather and where it is housed. Do you use spreadsheets to handle your data? Do you use any marketing analytics software? Do you rely on analytics features in broader products such as your CRM platform?
Use your analytics tools to learn about the areas where you spend the most time, features that may be used more frequently, and any potential issues with your current system. This is an excellent opportunity to redefine procedures in modest but significant ways.
In any event, how you analyze first-party data—the information you collect about your customers—will be critical in improving your long-term marketing plan.
This is due to a fundamental shift in the nature of third-party data—data collected by aggregators and supplied to you in the form of a dataset. As a result, first-party data and what you can do with it are more crucial than ever.
When you first start out, focus on descriptive metrics because they are easily accessible in any marketing analytics solution and provide a good picture of how your present efforts are performing. There is no need for extensive analysis at this point; instead, focus on gathering information and comparing it to the goals you defined in Step 1.
Step 3: Take note of data trends and pinpoint areas for improvement
You’re ready to enter the major domain of data analytics: the analysis itself, now that you’ve realigned your goals and have a decent grasp of what data you presently have access to.
This procedure will lead you to valuable, business-specific insights into your data. So how do you quantify their impact? There are two steps you can take to do this, and you’ll soon realize that the full value of marketing analytics exceeds the sum of its individual component. Determine the effect category for each effort first.
Gartner highlighted the three key effect categories as follows:
Gartner recognized the following three major impact categories:
- Efficiency of Operations
This category includes initiatives that aid in day-to-day marketing activities, such as KPI standardization and cross-channel dashboards. This translates into time saved for your marketing team.
- Contribution to Marketing
This category includes projects that affect the mix of your marketing modeling and delve into the predictive analytics previously described. Initiatives that have a precise and measurable impact on your entire marketing efforts, as measured in dollars saved or earned.
- Transformation of a Business
The final category is for analytics initiatives that have a significant impact on not only your marketing efforts but your entire organization. This includes launching totally new approaches informed by data or collaborating across departments.
Second, assess both the major and secondary consequences.
The main effects are those that are directly related to the original objective of any specific initiative:
Initiatives to improve operational efficiency save time
Marketing contribution programs lower media planning spending.
Business transformation projects bring new channels, customers, and, in some cases, entire markets to life.
Secondary impacts emerge from the preceding primary impacts, and they often result in a larger-scale alteration than primary impacts:
Improved operational efficiency opens up new marketing opportunities. The worth of such new initiatives is then determined by the secondary impact.
Marketing contribution efforts allow up funds for other uses. The secondary impact is the result of budget reallocation-enabled actions.
Initiatives for business transformation aid in the activation of new channels, customers, and markets.
These insights are what will enhance your outcomes, but bridging the gap between analysis and action is not always straightforward. According to Gartner, over three-quarters (73%) of marketing analytics team members and leaders agree that if the quality of analytics output were better, they would use marketing analytics in more decisions [1].
So, how do you improve the output quality of your analytics? Here comes data visualization.
Step 4: Tell an engaging data story using visualization tools
The significance of good data visualization cannot be emphasized. Indeed, according to Capterra’s 2022 Data Visualization in Marketing Survey*, 92% of marketing decision-makers believe that a well-designed presentation of marketing data would help them make better decisions in their everyday job.
Gartner advises three steps to deliver a compelling story to your decision-makers:
- Communicate in their language: Not every leader “speaks data.” Use high-level language that is easy to understand to convey the most crucial points.
- Actively listening: Listen to and internalize your leaders’ worries so that your data-driven solutions can address them ahead of time.
- Understand their point of view: Not all leaders are experts in marketing or data. To increase the likelihood that they will follow your ideas, try to grasp problems and potential solutions from their perspective.
Creating easy-to-understand and aesthetically appealing reports enables marketers to present information to executives and decision-makers in a beautiful way that tells a captivating story.
According to Gartner, marketing analytics teams frequently focus on insights that assist in quantifying the impact of specific efforts but are less adept at linking outcomes to broader corporate goals. This is when data storytelling enters the picture.
Step 5: Develop a data management strategy
You’ve started evaluating your data, discovered the features and tools that work best for you, and are learning to present a compelling story to leadership. Now is the moment to guarantee that your new and better plan is long-term viable.
Having a good data governance approach can assist you in accomplishing this. Simply said, assigning someone to maintain track of your data, integrate it with third-party applications, and function as a point person for internal reporting is excellent practice. This person is most often a marketing leader, a data specialist, or a marketer like yourself.
Conclusion
It’s likely that your team is too small to allocate one person to data governance. Maybe you may be growing rapidly, and you require assistance in making sense of it all. That’s fine! In that situation, it could be a good idea to consider employing a marketing analytics agency.
An analytics provider may educate you and your team on best practices, generate regular reports, and assist you with the strategic execution of your marketing data. Depending on your goals and resources, this can be a project-based or continuing engagement. It is not straightforward to transition from data collection to a full-fledged data analysis system. Yet, armed with this 5-step procedure, you’ll be more than ready to take on the challenge. Increasing your tool utilization, expanding your knowledge, and learning how to present data analysis to key decision-makers helps ensure that your advice and marketing efforts are taken seriously.
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