“I’ll care about my marketing analytics when I’ve got the time and budget.”
Ahhh….bad idea buddy!
Unsurprising (to us anyway), in 2020 marketers are expected to spend over 11% of their total budget on analytics.
(Source: CMOSurvey.org, via HBR.org).
You see, no matter the size of your organisation, the industry that you operate within or the number of employees in your marketing team—analytics are the golden nuggets that will unlock your team’s true potential in 2020!
…And good news! You don’t need to slave away with a pan and shovel to score these golden nuggets!
In this blog you will learn:
- High-Impact Uses for Marketing Analytics
- Takeaways to Get You Started with Marketing Analytics Today
3 High-Impact Uses for Marketing Analytics
To Test, Track and Validate Marketing Success (And failures)
Starting simple. We are still gobsmacked by the number of businesses that aren’t regularly tracking their marketing analytics to measure and optimise the success of their campaigns.
Despite the fact, 99% of organisations think data is essential to marketing success (Chicago Analytics Group), there are still so many Marketing Managers who fail to harness analytics.
If for nothing else, pretty, pretty please use marketing analytics to test, validate and track your marketing success!
I mean if you want to keep winging it you can stay in your self-affirming echo chamber you can. But we wouldn’t recommend it!
Potential data sources for testing:
- Google Analytics
- CRM / Marketing Automation Interactions
- Social Analytics
- PPC / SEM
- Heatmaps or web optimisation tools (A/B testing data)
- Team efficiencies and output
Blogs for tracking and testing:
- Google Analytics: A Beginners Set-up Guide and Why It is an Untouched Goldmine
- Beginners Guide to UTM Tracking
To Create Strong Internal Benchmarks
Time to turn, “I think this has been our campaign yet…”, into “I know this has been our best campaign yet!”
Although it’s important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, your greatest competitor should always be…YOU!
Your aim should be to improve by just a little (or a lot if possible) every campaign. Big wins are great, but consistency is key!
In his book, Atomic Habits James Clear writes about the power of ‘continuous improvement’. This is a highly-analytical philosophy that led the British Cycling to win seven out of ten gold medals at the Beijing Olympics and helped the LA Lakers become the first team in twenty years to win back-to-back NBA championships.
Now I know your marketing team aren’t world-class athletes (or are they?) but this philosophy speaks to the power of clearly defining your internal benchmarks and working to improve them, just 1% at a time!
(Great book btw!)
Potential data sources for benchmarketing:
- Sales metrics
- Website traffic
- Average order value (AOV)
- Email marketing click-through, open rate and conversion
- Social engagement
De-Risk Innovation
Innovation can get dangerous…if you’re acting on a whim.
Ask Elon Musk, who just last year tried to swoop in and save the day with his mini-submarine designed to assist with the Thai soccer team cave rescue.
‘Innovation’ doesn’t always make sense, and it won’t always solve the problem. That’s why we need to use data, insights and…common sense to de-risk our ideas!
Even the world’s best innovators can fail if they don’t de-risk their ideas!
Innovation backed by solid customer insight is actually relatively ‘safe’—this is how smart businesses grow!
An example from another great book I’ve picked up recently, SPRINT: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Google’s Product Manager Jake Knapp.
This book shows how in just 5 days, customer insights and analytics can be used to form a hypothesis for testing, narrow and refine variables and finally, decide on a winning prototype.
It is evidenced that analytics are drawn upon at every stage of the innovation process to validate the creative and critical ideas presented. This is what de-risking innovation looks like. It’s fast-paced, collaborative and highly-reliant on marketing analytics!
When innovation is attempted in isolation of insights…it can get hella dangerous.
3 Takeaways to Get You Started with Marketing Analytics Today
Be Considerate of Unconscious Bias
Nobody is safe from unconscious bias. It’s only human to seek out validifying results, especially when it’s our own hard work and creative output under the microscope.
To minimise the impact of unconscious bias define your hypothesis and metrics for testing PRIOR to implementing your campaign
Record You Benchmarks
Benchmarking is the most effective way to accurately track your success!
Before you do anything else, carry out an assessment of your existing customer marketing activities and track in a spreadsheet how often:
- You are implementing lead-generation activities, what type of engagement are they seeing and ultimately, what return on investment (ROI) did they have
- What are your analytics saying about engagement throughout the customer’s journey? Think rate of return (RoR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Time to Conversion (mapped as Time Lag in GA)
- Finally, do you have any benchmark measurements of customer loyalty? Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (cSat)
Once you have a snapshot of the quality of your output today, the next step is to use this information as a reference to help you keep on improving.
Utilise the MANY Free Tools at Your Disposal
Back to the most common objection we hear, “I’ll care about my marketing analytics when I’ve got the time and budget.”
This is a pretty sh*tty excuse!
Without a doubt, there are a number of advanced Mar-Tech software providers that will cost you an arm and a leg. These platforms are very powerful and are a great solution for a well-established business enterprise.
HOWEVER, there is also a bucketload of free (or almost free) tools you can use to grow your business to that point.
- Customer surveying = Google / Microsoft Forms or Survey Monkey
- Customer behaviour = Google Analytics, social analytics dashboards
- Search insights = Google Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, Ahrefs, SEMrush
And that’s just to name a few. No more excuses!
And I’ll leave it at that. I’m not going to say mastering marketing analytics is the easiest thing on earth. It’s a constant learning process that takes time, skill and a continual dedication to improvement. but at the end of the day, great marketing cannot exist in isolation of analytics. It’s as simple as that!
Please shoot us an email at enquiries@milkit.com.au if you have any questions.