Importance of Data Analytics in Marketing and How it Helps with Your Reach

2022-03-02

Today's customer experience has changed exponentially with the availability of so many digital tools. The same person searching for a product or service can end up at the same website that someone else was also searching in an entirely different way. Since customers have multiple avenues in which to locate a product or service, it can be challenging to know what the best methods are for your business to ensure that yours ranks high enough.

Data analytics provides the opportunity for companies and marketing teams to gain more insight to help make their business more relevant and establish themselves within saturated markets. Standing out is the biggest goal for your brand to attract your customers. Instead of a more broad outreach, with analytics, you can leverage more precise information to target your brand strategies and the user experience.

When the essential aspects of your marketing are available, it creates an established roadmap for growth and boosts sales development. You can easily scale your products or services to further meet your audience's needs. Understanding what trends are about to happen and being able to jump on them almost as soon as they occur is vital to your marketing strategy.

When you create an effective marketing strategy for your brand, data analytics must be at the forefront of your efforts. There are several ways to interpret data and outline the importance of data analytics for your business and how it aids your reach. ‍

Types of data‍

Marketing teams should work to focus on three types of data: Customer, Financial, and Operational. The types of data are broken down as such:‍

  • ‍Customer Data - The customer data allows marketers to evaluate their target demographic. It goes beyond names, email addresses, and previous purchases to things like behavior and what they like on social media and other communities.‍
  • Financial Data - You can operate more efficiently by gathering data about your financials, including sales and marketing statistics, margins, accurate pricing, and costs for your advertisements regarding specific launches and targeted campaigns.‍
  • Operational Data - Daily operations can also be serviced with the use of data analytics. For example, processes regarding logistics, shipping, and other systems can help your business determine where they can work to improve procedures and reduce time to get your product or service to the consumer more directly.

Your brand's marketing efforts should intertwine all of these data types within the analytics, but it helps to understand your business objectives and align with your missions and values. The formulation of strategies should work together to bring your goals to fruition using analytics.

So, why is implementing data analytics so important for your marketing strategies? With these three types of data in mind, you can easily adapt your business in ways you might not have thought possible or maybe even thought of at all.‍

Knowing your audience better

The customer is the most crucial part of a marketing strategy - you need to effectively engage and entice your potential customers with your product or service, so understanding their needs and how you can help is a high priority. With data that you receive from analytics, you can discover:

  • What types of advertisements work best for your clients - is it video, social media clips, sponsored ads, or email marketing? Maybe you even have clients who prefer cold calling? You can go down many avenues for advertising, and your company does not have to limit itself to just one type of advertisement. Still, you will want to leverage the data you receive to prioritize which types to use first.
  • What types of campaigns to create - analytics will be able to show you what kinds of marketing campaigns are resonating with your audience. It could be more SEO-driven, content-driven, social media, or display ad campaigns that draw your consumers to your product or service.
  • What content to utilize within your marketing - data analytics will also help you in the development of your content, whether by videos, pictures, or words. The methods you use help to optimize your content and messages more effectively.

Search engine optimization

When your company uses analytics properly, you can analyze how to use the right keywords and phrases for your customers. The data provides how your customers are searching for products and services to use the exact words they would and target audiences with those keywords to drive traffic. 

Using the right keywords and phrases throughout your marketing strategy can help you with your business objectives. However, it would be best if you were sure to utilize those phrases and important words across all channels of your marketing. These channels may include social media platforms, website content, calls to action, paid ads, and other digital marketing tactics that you use for your business.‍

Forecasting your future outcomes

Data analysis gives you a look into the past performance of your business, which can help to predict your future further. In addition, determining what worked in the past and what did not helps to optimize your techniques for campaigns used for your digital marketing strategy. 

You can look at your budget usage and change it to fit into the methods that are working better. Your marketing teams can determine ad spend and how it affects the overall profit, which aids in determining your return on investment (ROI). Analytics provides tracking of the various marketing metrics you establish in real-time, updated data that impact decision-making for your next steps.

Data analytics tools

Data analytics won't work properly without the right analytics tools. They can help you test new tactics, address issues, bring about new ideas, track performance, and everything will be brought back to how it helps your bottom line and boosts profits.

Some of the standard data analytics tools that you can utilize are:‍

Testing‍

A/B Testing is a helpful way in which you can test out variations of things on your website, app, or on social media. As a result, you provide your brand with what your customers find more appealing, and you can effectively improve your product or services by learning what they like and how it helps your business convert. ‍

Display ads

If your marketing team has the budget to develop either display or banner advertising, you can quickly provide customers with a click-through option to your landing page. Marketing teams can track clicks and actual conversions, how many people engage with this tool, and more. If your customers like to see, display ads will have your potential customer quickly making a purchase or subscription. 

Event-based

Maybe your business needs a deep dive into unique visitors to your website or landing pages and why they are there. These tools include marketing automation, web analytics, and app analytics.‍

Google Analytics is a popular tool to help monitor your users' actions regarding all of your brand's touchpoints. For example, it can view when they visited, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, and help provide your company with a clear strategy to deliver results.

You can also use tools to measure search traffic on your website and performance so that you can fix existing issues. Arranging how you operate digitally around the centralized focus to improve the customer experience will help you offer better services.‍

Predictive analysis

When you evaluate historical data, marketing teams can identify prospective customers and market other products that they might be interested in based on their audience. As a result, you can upsell and cross-sell more effectively with predictive analysis.

Analytics audit

It is worth noting that undergoing an audit for your analytics tools can help serve you better in the long run. For example, when you are auditing Google Analytics, you can ensure that they are set up correctly and provide you with better insight into how you will position your brand.

Better brand awareness

With customer engagement at the forefront, you should also know that analytics in marketing can provide a significant impact on brand awareness. For example, marketing teams can develop customer-specific content that creates a recognizable phrase, logo, or other forms of recall. A study performed by Aberdeen Group discovered that retailers had seen an increase in brand awareness from their data by 2.7 times above others. 

Broadens your reach

Using data analytics provides you with more personalized data from various sources across websites, emails, live chats, interactions, and applications. When you have all of these places to gather leads from, you can hone in on your customers and outperform your competitors for increased acquisition.

You can acquire, process, and analyze real-time data quickly so that your marketing strategy can take action right away. With this kind of intelligence, your business can maximize both time and cost savings.

Implement data analytics for your business

Marketers understand that investing in data analytics embrace technology to help tackle numerous challenges businesses face. Utilizing tools and automation allows your organization to extract and analyze data from almost any digital source thoroughly.

The three types of data help your brand's marketing strategy in better engaging and retaining loyal customers, as well as building value in your business. There has never been a better time to start integrating analytics to help your business grow more efficiently and ultimately transform your customer experience.

Tags:
Business Education
Marketing Advice
Written by Sean Lund-Brown

Sean Lund-Brown is a current Marketing Assistant for Smith.ai. A graduate from Metropolitan State University of Denver, Sean graduated with a BA in Music and an individualized degree in Teaching Vocal Pedagogy.

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