Why Your Marketing Needs Analytics

The Power of Measuring

No campaign or business can ever reach it’s full potential without analytics encouraging the efforts, supporting the ideas and measuring the results. Marketing analytics differs from web analytics in that it focuses on finding leads, upping sales and driving traffic to your site, while web analytics focuses more on how long people stayed on a page or how many unique visitors there are to your website. So let’s explore what marketing analytics really is and discover the power that lies within that data.

Why Analytics?

In a marketing effort what’s the number one thing you want to know? You want to know if your efforts are translating into results. Is this ad working? Are we reaching the right audience? Is this effort bringing more leads into our business? These types of questions are what every company needs to be asking itself if they hope to make their marketing effective.

Surprisingly enough, businesses aren’t creating measurable results. According to a survey by ifbyphone, four out of five marketing executives expect measurable campaigns, yet only 29 percent can deliver. This is largely in part because marketing analytics is a relatively new niche in the infrastructure of a business. In fact, according to a survey by IBM only 30 percent of chief marketing officers feel prepared for the explosion of data that is occurring in the marketplace.

How to Harness the Power

To really harness the power of marketing analytics you need to know what you’re looking for. Just like “Inception” there are many different levels to reach in order to make a real difference. Mashable lists four categories that distinguish these differences and are as follows: reach, engagement, advocacy and return on investment.

Reach – this level of marketing analysis includes an understanding of the scale of your marketing effort, how many likes, fans and followers you have and what context they are discussing your brand.

Engagement – this takes marketing one step further helping a company understanding the key influencers and main activities their community experiences.

Advocacy – even more in-depth is understanding a user’s behaviors in order to discover what type of person is drawn to your brand then tailor messages and referrals in that direction.

ROI – the deepest level a company can reach is aiming to achieve actual data on how their efforts added to the bottom line. This is difficult because it’s hard to identify the correct metrics to measure ROI. But with the right equipment, it’s possible.

If you’re looking to increase your marketability with analytics, see what Method can do for you.