In a world where digital marketing is the name of the game, there’s a star player who gets underestimated. Marketing analytics is often swept under the rug and forgotten about. But how can you improve and see results if you don’t know what you’re trying to improve on? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can make a difference in how you carry on with your marketing efforts. 

Digital insights and analytics is a way of measuring and analyzing data to better understand the effects of marketing activities and to find ways to improve marketing efforts and ROI. Good marketing analytics practices are effective and efficient, which includes consolidating all your channels into one place to compare them next to each other. This is why marketing automation is such an important and useful tool… it allows you to utilize a single software to aid in the analysis of the impact of your tactics.

Utilizing data and analytics works in your favor; you can learn what worked so far and why, you can understand the return on investment (ROI) of sales and marketing tactics, and begin to see trends over time to forecast future results.

#1: Learn what works - and why

Using analytics is simply a great way to learn what is working and what is not. It’s a great way to sift through marketing strategy and see which tactics are paying off. So you might have an Instagram account, a Youtube channel, and a LinkedIn account for your business, but are they all really getting the job done? Is one performing better than the other? By tracking your actions and taking time to report on and assess the performance of those platforms, it can help to show exactly what types of messages and content are making the most impact.

A whopping 84% of marketers cannot measure and report on the contribution of their programs to their business. Being able to report your strengths and weaknesses is important. It gives your team a reason to trust what you’re doing and to know that the resources are not being wasted.

#2: Understand the roi of each tactic & strategy 

One of the most important parts of using analytics is learning how to stretch your dollar the right way. If you know the return on investment for different marketing tactics, you can decide what is working for you. Using reporting tools for your marketing efforts can dramatically change how you spend your money. Once you figure out what does and does not work, you can stop spending on campaigns and tactics that don’t pay out. 

Forbes Insights tells us only 21% of marketers are employing analytics to measure marketing ROI for all marketing engagement. That means that even though most marketers are using analytics for some tools, most are not using it for ALL tools. And this can lead to uninformed decisions by marketers, which in turn, results in a poor customer experience.

So...if you utilize the analytics tools correctly, and across the board, you can successfully measure your ROI. Make sure you can see the entire picture to get a full view of what’s going on with your marketing tactics. 

#3: monitor trends to forecast future results

Marketing analytics is awesome because it is both accurate and specific. It gives you the details about your customers and their habits online. While you are trying to increase ROI and obtain better results, leveraging analytics allows you to use the data to create a better understanding of your target audience. 

Knowing the past and current trends of your marketing campaigns and tactics can give you insight to how things might play out in the future. This is a great way to engage customers in ways that have worked before and to get rid of things that haven’t worked in the past. 

There are many different web analytic tools that can help you get started with marketing analytics. Some of the tools, as mentioned above, are marketing automation tools that double as marketing analytics tools. Whereas there are specific tools and software out there that are strictly for marketing analytics. It all depends on what you’re looking for and whether or not you want to utilize marketing automation.

Marketing analytics can be extremely useful for multiple different reasons. If you aren’t looking at statistics and trends, it can be impossible to know how to move forward with your efforts. How can you possibly know where you need to go if you don’t know where you are? Marketing analytics is essential to growth, impact, and improvement.