Data analysis for marketing

Modern marketing is a data-driven process that’s fuelled by analytics. Although many marketers used to act on instinct and gut feel, modern marketing is much more scientific in nature. Now, analytical tools and approaches are central to the decision-making process and ensure that all key strategic decisions are quantifiable and driven by data. 

A recent study commissioned by Google underscores the importance of conducting data analysis for marketing campaigns. In a survey of 150 marketing and information technology executives, they found that more than half of ‘sophisticated marketers’ adhere to well-established metrics that tie directly to business objectives. They also found that these marketers are at least three times more likely to hit their goals. 

According to further research from the Harvard Business Review, most businesses planned to increase the portion of their marketing budget allocated to analytics from 5.8% to 17.3% between 2018 and 2021. Since, a study from Salesforce has shown this shift has taken place. In their State of Marketing in 2021 study, Salesforce found that 19% of B2C marketing budgets are now being invested in tools and technology. The same can be said for 16% of B2B marketing budgets. 

What is data analysis for marketing? 

Data analysis involves finding patterns in marketing data. By carrying out the data analysis process, you can increase actionable knowledge and improve marketing performance. 

Marketing analytics employs statistics, predictive modelling, and machine learning to reveal insights and answer key questions. In the world of marketing, data analysis is critical if you want to understand and predict user behaviour, as well as optimise the user experience in order to drive sales.

Why conduct data analysis on marketing campaigns? 

By going through a marketing analytics process, your team can turn raw marketing data into an action plan that will help you make the most of your marketing budget. When conducting a data analysis of your marketing campaigns, you’ll receive a number of benefits and insights. This is because, by subjecting your data to analysis, you will be able to answer key questions about the successes and failures of your marketing campaigns.

For example, if your business usually has monthly revenues of £2,000 a month but you notice that your revenues have risen to £3,000 a month following an email marketing campaign, then you may initially believe that the rise in revenues can be directly attributed to that campaign. However, by running a data analysis, you may find that:

• There was an industry-wide uptick in sales that month
• You had other campaigns running alongside this that were more successful than usual
• Very few customers actually came to your website through your email campaign

As a result, by conducting a data analysis, you may realise that the success was circumstantial and the campaign wasn’t successful enough to run again. By making decisions based on data, you can avoid working on hunches and instead quantify decisions. By doing so, you’ll avoid wasting your budget and ensure that you’re maximising ROI.

One great way of conducting data analysis for marketing campaigns is by utilising marketing analytics software. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the importance of marketing analytics and how our software can help you improve the performance of your campaigns.

Importance of marketing analytics

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing, and analysing marketing performance with the aim of maximising the effectiveness of campaigns and optimising return on investment. It involves taking data from multiple sources (both offline and online) to get a 360-degree view of your marketing activity.

As part of this, marketing analytics data can help your team make important decisions relating to not only marketing campaigns, but also to strategic business choices such as product improvements and branding. By taking data from multiple sources and combining it into a single view, you can prevent silos and ensure you’re always fully informed before you make a decision.

Using a data-driven marketing strategy, you can discern patterns between conversions, customer behaviour, regional preferences, creative preferences, and more. As a result, marketing analytics allows you to see exactly how your campaign contributed to conversions and it provides an objective lens through which you can analyse your efforts and make adjustments for the future.  

The importance of marketing analytics cannot be understated. In the modern age, customers and consumers have become highly selective in choosing the brands they engage with. As a result, if your business wants to catch the attention of its ideal customer, then it must effectively employ a data-driven marketing strategy that utilises analytics to create targeted communications. By doing this, you can serve your customers with the right ad at the right time on the right channel, every time.

However, the importance of marketing analytics doesn’t end there. Many businesses use marketing analytics and a data-driven marketing strategy to provide them with information about:

Product development

Using the power of marketing analytics, you can investigate how your products perform within the market. By speaking to your customers through surveys, you can learn more about the competitive advantages your product provides and understand where it lags behind other options on the market. Plus, you can learn more about the product features your customers would like to see in future versions.  

Using the data you’ve gathered, other teams within the company can then tweak the product so that it better aligns with customer interests and helps them solve the problems they’re facing. By doing this, you can drive conversions and increase existing customer loyalty in future iterations.

Customer trends

In addition, your analytics can tell you a great deal about your customers. By segmenting your data, you can learn who your best customers are, who the cheapest customers are to acquire, the customers with the highest lifetime value, and customers who have the highest average purchase value.

Building profiles of your best customers then allows you to ensure you’re always targeting the right people. From here, you can learn what forms of messaging and creative resonate with them, and ensure you’re only targeting them with ads that convert.

Plus, by segmenting your customers based on particular behaviours, such as those who regularly browse without purchasing or those who abandon their shopping carts, you can work out how to best target these customers and win their business. Then, by following this with a series of tests, you can work out which channel is more effective e.g. email marketing vs. Facebook targeting, and then roll this campaign out at scale. This process minimises waste and ensures you’re not targeting customers in places they’re not looking.  

On top of this, data analysis can also provide you with information about areas of a buyer’s journey that could be improved. For example, you may discover that the checkout process needs to be simpler, or you may find out the buyer journey is too complicated.

How campaigns compare

Similarly, a deep dive into your data can help you compare your data sets to each other. For instance, you can see:

• How your organic search, paid search, and social media campaigns have performed against each other and your estimates
• How the ROI on different campaigns and channels compares
• Whether you generated more revenue in certain demographics and segments

If you understand how your campaigns, content initiatives, and customer groups relate, then you can make informed decisions about which campaigns are best for your business.

Predicting future results

Once you’ve gathered all of this data and interpreted it correctly, you can use the information to predict future results. This is because you’ll have a much better understanding of the performance of your campaigns, and you’ll be able to apply this knowledge to all future marketing efforts, building on your successes and learning from your mistakes in the process.

But crucially, not only will you understand whether your campaign worked, but you’ll also understand why it worked or failed. Putting these learnings into future campaigns will allow you to maximise your successes and improve ROI. Plus, thanks to the data available, you’ll find it simpler to explain effectiveness to stakeholders.

Apteco marketing products

Pieces of software that conduct data analytics for marketing campaigns are incredibly helpful in this process. For example, Apteco Orbit can help you collect, organise, visualise and analyse your data quickly, allowing you to generate real-time insights.

When you conduct data analytics for marketing campaigns with the help of our analytics software solutions, you can analyse millions of customer data records in seconds. No matter what the size of your business, our software turns your data into a source of intelligent analysis. Plus, it makes it simple to realise the full value of your data, unifying it and placing it into one single customer view that allows for actionable data exploration, visualisation, and data mining.

With the help of marketing analysis software, you can explore your data in greater detail than ever before. This means you can identify patterns in transactional data, perform customer profiling analysis, or execute a geographic analysis in only a few clicks. Using software to help with data analytics for marketing campaigns will allow you to:

• Segment your customers and ensure that everyone receives the personalised experience they expect
• Delve deeper into the data your business has available
• Identify new opportunities
• Create interactive charts, Venn diagrams, and word clouds that show results at a glance
• Harness the power of machine learning and advanced modelling techniques to calculate the best next products to tempt customers with
• Create audiences for your campaigns

If you’re interested in learning more about how marketing analytics software can help improve your data analytics, then book a demo today and experience the power of Apteco software for yourself.