As a business owner in the digital space, a stronghold on digital marketing analytics will help you become an expert in driving impactful marketing. Digital marketing analysis includes skills that can help you out with brand building, lead generation, and competitive research, as well as a firm understanding of how to use data analytics in marketing.
This post could be your guide to unpacking this concept of digital marketing analytics. We’ll also give you a rundown of marketing analytics challenges as well as how to use data analytics in marketing.
What is Digital Marketing Analytics?
Digital marketing analytics is the key to creating a campaign that rakes in customers and cash instead of one that flops. It’s a set of tools you can use to analyze marketing data and/or metrics to identify relevant data or information. You can use this data to improve future marketing strategies to ensure lead generation and profit maximization.
The Role of Data Analytics in Marketing
With data analytics, the possibilities are endless. For your marketing plan, digital marketing analysis can help you create a custom-made plan for your brand’s needs, taking your business model and customers into consideration. Digital marketing analysis is the actual step-by-step process you engage in to evaluate your target audience, potential customers, and competitors to create a digital marketing plan that is tailored to your brand. The ultimate goal is to reach your audience and convert them.
Digital marketing analysis involves a simple framework that starts from the inside, works its way out, and returns to base. Essentially, you’ll begin by reviewing your company’s current digital marketing strategy and campaigns. Then you’ll move on to researching your target audience as well as your competitors. Eventually, you’ll take all the data you’ve gathered and rebuild your marketing strategy.
Big Data for Digital Marketing Analysis
For your company’s digital marketing analysis, you need to draw data from different sources and ensure proper data analysis and interpretation. This may depend on your business but usually would include market research, social media, email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and other aspects of your digital marketing.
With data analytics, you can analyze big data to develop insight and make informed predictions that can improve your marketing outcomes. Take a CRM for instance. With a standard CRM, you should be able to do more than store large data on your customers. You’ll be able to categorize, manage, and integrate these data to help you with your business growth. Be sure to learn how big data is changing retail marketing analytics to improve marketing outcomes. That way, you’d be able to perform data analysis and interpretation that can give you the insight you need to grow your business.
How to Use Data Analytics in Marketing
In the digital space now, we are not just about tracking results to prove that we are getting a return on investment. We’ve gone past that to analyzing data and applying results to improve marketing campaigns and outcomes. That is the very essence of how to use data analytics in marketing.
As simple as it sounds, data analysis and interpretation have the potential to be the single most effective aspect of your digital marketing game.
Now, here’s how to do this –
Start with data collection. Without proper data collection, well, you’ll hardly have any data to analyze! Fortunately, this can be done quite simply with software such as Google Analytics. Next is analyzing the data. If you’re already using specific software for this, then you’re on the right track. You just need to learn a few tips to keep you going. Primarily, focus on organic search traffic. That way, you’ll be able to figure out what drives this organic traffic and how you can use that to your advantage. To get more accurate data, you should consider Google ads auto-tagging. Finally, you can apply your findings to your future marketing campaigns.
Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? It’s easy to see people eager to capitalize upon digital marketing analysis and digital marketing analytics in general. However, they are not without challenges.
Marketing Analytics Challenges
You may have encountered some of these already. The good thing is with a little bit of troubleshooting, you can easily determine what is causing the holdup and figure out how to get past it. Some of the digital marketing analytics challenges you could encounter, and their fixes include the following:
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Issues with gathering data
This probably sounds like it might not be an issue and so it’s easy to overlook this aspect of digital marketing analytics. Instead, the focus is often just on how to use data analytics in marketing. It is certainly worthwhile for business owners to think about how to gather this data especially since it can get rather complex. You need to collect data from multiple sources in several different forms all while maintaining accuracy.
To ensure the profitability of your digital marketing, you need to optimize your data collection efforts. Consider direct API integrations to ensure you have current data. You could also add tracking links to your ads to automatically collect data for your campaigns.
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Poor data quality
Finding the right type of data is extremely important. When you spend all your time and a sizeable chunk of other resources on data collection for your business, you expect to collect quality data that can actually be used to improve your marketing and avoid marketing analytics challenges.
Poor data could potentially taint high-quality data which could in turn, taint your marketing efforts. Being able to distinguish between poor and high-quality data would prevent this issue. One thing you could do is use the right data platform, so you end up with the right type of data for your business.
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Issues with analyzing business data
Big data can present with hassles of analysis, in turn creating more marketing analytics challenges. At some point, one has to determine when they are working with big data versus when they are working with too much data that can present with marketing analytics challenges. Having all that data without a plan for analysis makes developing a strategic marketing plan almost impossible. Fortunately, by finding the right data analysis platform, you should be able to overcome this. Once you have this platform, you should look out for patterns that could help you make the best marketing decisions for your brand.
How Big Data is Changing Retail Marketing Analytics
Big data is a major driving force in the industry. With the advent of information explosion, there have been massive (still ongoing) efforts to fully understand and transform this concept into useful metrics for businesses. Thankfully, much headway has been made on that front.
You are probably more concerned with how to use data analytics in marketing and rightfully so. With big data, companies can improve their digital marketing. This could be done by learning insights about customer behaviors and using that to improve their marketing decisions. As a business owner, you can use digital marketing analytics to deduce your customer characteristics and needs through various sources such as search history, trends, and other behaviors.
Beyond wondering how to use data analytics in marketing, you could also get in on the action now. A few ways you could do this is to analyze your customer insights. Based on the results of your digital marketing analytics, you could go ahead to include targeted advertising in your marketing campaign. Similarly, you could create content that has been tailored to your target audience after your data analysis and interpretation.
By simply doing some big data analysis, you could have a world of key information that could transform the way you relate with your customers – old and new.
Market Segmentation as a Digital Marketing Plan
If you’re still wondering how to use data analysis in marketing despite the challenges, here’s a great idea to consider – market segmentation.
With market segmentation, you’ll be able to define your customers based on specific characteristics, providing you with smaller groups you can take on more effectively.
There are several ways you could approach this. Some of the best marketing strategies we’ve seen focus on the following kinds of data analysis – Psychographic Analysis, Customer Demographic Analysis, Competitor Pricing Analysis, and Customer Segmentation Analysis.
Psychographic Analysis
Psychographic data includes information regarding a person’s values, interests, and personality. You could use such data to come up with deeply targeted marketing campaigns to improve your conversion rates. Your ability to personalize messages & landing pages, ask key questions, and ultimately convert leads to paying customers often relies on the quality of your psychographic analysis. You could focus on personality characteristics, lifestyle, social class, interests, and habits since these cover several of the psychographic characteristics out there.
To find this type of data, you need to do some research. For instance, you could interview your customers to find out more about them. A simple survey or questionnaire asking about their fun weekend could provide you with a gold mine of psychographic data. You could also take advantage of the results from your data analysis and interpretation here. Don’t forget to look at your digital marketing analytics results.
While psychographic analysis can be valuable, it would not be a great idea to rely on just that. Let’s take a look at other common forms of data analysis for digital marketing.
Customer Demographic Analysis
This provides you with a cache of important information about your customers such as their ages, genders, occupation, ethnicity, geographical location, educational level, etc. With this information, you can further tailor your ads and marketing campaigns for specific groups.
Whether psychographic analysis or customer demographic analysis, be wary about grouping customers for your digital marketing analytics. Customers in the same demographic category may be in different psychographic classes. The point of an encompassing data analytics plan is to find that sweet spot that converts as many leads as possible, to provide optimal value to your company.
Competitor Pricing Analysis
Adequate digital marketing analytics can improve your pricing strategy. Deciding on a suitable price for your product requires quite a bit of research. You want to make a profit rather than lose money. As for your customers, they’re probably looking for the best value for their money. You will need a well-defined pricing strategy to ensure you get it right.
This is another instance in a business where data analysis and interpretation come in handy. With competitor pricing analysis, you can use your competitor’s prices as benchmarks to decide on yours. It’s also a great way to track your competitors and stay on top of trends in the industry.
To do some competitor pricing analysis, start by finding your competitors. This includes companies that provide similar products as you and within the same price range. Next, research their pricing strategy. You can also compare your marketing strategies in the context of pricing. For instance, find out if your companies offer similar discounts or sales offers. You could use any insights you gain from competitor pricing analysis to inform your pricing policy and your marketing decisions.
Customer Segmentation Analysis
Customer segmentation analysis allows you to gain insights specific to a group of customers. You’ll be able to focus more on how your customers interact and engage with your products & services, or brand in general. This usually includes purchasing, browsing, and spending habits. Customer segmentation analysis is also the aspect of digital marketing analytics where brand loyalty and other interactions come into play. Your first task would be to segment your customers as accurately as possible. Then you should determine how to engage with each segment based on your data analysis and interpretation. Eventually, you can leverage these results when coming up with marketing plans for your customers.
Upping Your Digital Marketing Analytics Game
With proper digital marketing analysis, you can use the results you gather to motivate your audience to buy from or engage positively with your business. You could also improve your efforts at creating the perfect call-to-action for your business.
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