Marketing strategies have changed significantly over the years. When the concept of marketing began, marketing strategies focused on the products themselves. Customer needs and wants had not yet come into the picture.
Fast-forward to today, and this idea has changed drastically. Marketing strategies revolve significantly around customers and their expectations, and this is all made possible due to the power of marketing analytics. The fact that over 76% of marketers base their decisions on these analytics puts their significance in modern marketing analytics into perspective.
This blog explores how analytics is shaping modern marketing strategies and why you should incorporate it into your own.
What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is the practice of collecting marketing data across the internet to help optimize companies by giving them better insight into customer behavior. Marketing analytics influence over 53% of all marketing decisions, making them essential for marketers who want their business to progress.
Let us look at how this data-driven marketing tactic impacts marketing strategies and helps businesses thrive.
How does Strong Analytics Shape Modern Marketing Strategies?
Social media platforms launched between 2000 and 2005, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and LinkedIn, generated data that marketers realized they could analyze to know exactly what their target customers were looking for, their pain points, and their expectations.
As more platforms came about and their audiences grew, so did the amount of information that could be mined. Modern marketing strategies use tools to collect and analyze data across all customer touchpoints so they can use analytics in marketing for better decisions.
There are three types of marketing analytics for better marketing.
Three Modes of Marketing Analytics
Now, for the uninitiated, there are three primary modes of data analysis in marketing:
- Descriptive analytics: This form focuses on historical data from previous campaigns to help refine your marketing strategies.
- Predictive analytics: Here, historical data is combined with statistical models to forecast future marketing trends.
- Prescriptive Analytics: This form of analytics uses all of the above information to help you determine the best course of action across multiple scenarios.
Note: Though statistics clearly show that employing analytics in marketing can help them achieve nearly 5x profitability, less than 20% of B2B marketers are taking full advantage of marketing analytics with technology like predictive analytics and others.
How To Get Started With Marketing Analytics?
While the concept of marketing analytics may seem intimidating, the following steps can serve as a rough guide if you are looking to adopt this strategy into your marketing arsenal.
- Step 1: Define the end goal of your marketing strategy, be it establishing your brand or driving sales.
- Step 2: Invest in a good CRM solution to create a single source of truth for all necessary data.
- Step 3: Analyze your data. (based on the three types of analytic models covered earlier)
- Step 4: Continuously test different marketing strategies and analyze the results. Use data-driven insights to refine your approach and optimize your campaigns.
Note: While modern-day analytics focus on understanding a specific target audience, it can also be used to see what your competition is up to. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you can use the same technology to analyze your competition's marketing efforts, see what's working for them and what's not, and then alter your strategies to capitalize on their areas of improvement.
Wrapping It Up
Marketing analytics is the linchpin that can make all the difference in helping you stand out from your competition or fade into the crowd. With a large chunk of marketers still not using analytics to its fullest, now is the time to capitalize and move ahead.
That said, sometimes it's better to rope in the experts than try to tackle things alone. Our crack team of marketing analytics experts at Seventh Triangle can help you get the most out of your customer data.
Get in touch with us to see what we can do for you.