How to Use Data Analytics to Improve Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re wondering how data analytics can improve your marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place.

Analytics serves as a navigator for a marketing campaign; it’s a map, a compass, and a guide.

Using analytics, you can improve your process of creating products and promoting them. You start with data, use it as a reference when a campaign is in full swing, and summarize the results.

Marketing campaign analytics makes your success predictable, decreases the risk of failures, helps increase ROI, and, finally, strengthens your position in the market.

So, how can you use data analytics to improve marketing strategy?

Let’s find out.

Why Do You Need Marketing Analytics to Advertise Your Brand?

For the simple reason that analytics helps you understand where you stand. Everyone uses analytics. In fact, according to Deloitte research, the vast majority of Chief Data Officers (68%) are focusing on improving their use of insights and analytics.

Image via Deloitte

Through data analytics, you can figure out how your marketing strategy is faring and what you can do to improve its results.

Let’s try to understand the importance of data analytics for marketing strategy with an example.

Let’s imagine you don’t have the analytics capabilities to serve your goals in promotion. However, you need to launch a PPC campaign. After a day or two, you want to assess your campaign’s effectiveness to correct your strategy. Here are the questions to which you can’t get answers unless you use marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics:

• How many users saw your ad?
• What are their gender, age, location?
• How many users, among those who saw your ad, clicked on it?
• How many users, among those who clicked your ad, took the action you expect from them, such as adding an item to their cart or making a call to a manager?
• How many dollars of profit did you get for every dollar that you invested in your campaign?

You need data to answer all the questions mentioned. Otherwise, you risk your money going down the drain. And that’s why data analytics is important for improving your marketing strategy.

What Goals Can You Achieve with Data Analytics

Let’s move from one simple example of a PPC campaign to a more general topic. What goals can you achieve by using web analytics in your company’s marketing activities?

Although goals can be slightly different for each brand, there are a bunch of objectives that you can use as a reference for enhancing your promotional campaign strategy performance:

• Understanding your target audience: By using key metrics, you can draw valuable conclusions about your prospective clients’ intentions and expectations toward your products and services to optimize your digital marketing campaigns.

• Optimizing ROI: Analytics tools make it possible to understand what advertising channels are the most effective and place bets on them. You can increase ROI from your marketing efforts by doubling down on things that work.

• Enhancing campaign effectiveness: The tables, building a custom marketing analytics platform, customizable dashboards, reports, and other sources of data are made with the primary goal in mind, which is to make a marketing strategy more effective. Data helps to provide personalized experiences, enhance customer engagement, and avoid costly missteps.

How to Use Data Analytics to Improve Marketing Strategy

Now that you know the advantages of analyzing data and how it can influence your campaign and strategy performance, let’s try to understand how you can get it right.

Here are the top ways to use marketing analytics to improve marketing campaign:

1. Pick the Right Metrics

Start by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and sales metrics aligned with your campaign goals. These may include click-through rates, conversion rates, acquisition costs, lifetime value, and return on ad spend. KPIs should reflect your unique objectives, such as boosting order values, raising brand awareness, or increasing sales. Tracking them can give you actionable insights to inform your marketing strategy.

2. Know Your Customers

Analytics lets you gain insights into your customers needs, preferences, and behavior. By analyzing customer data from different sources, you can understand their behavioral patterns that will guide your decisions and help you reach success in your business.

You can understand what they like, dislike, and the main platforms they use to interact with your brand. This can help you plan out your marketing strategy better and launch targeted marketing campaigns.

3. Segment Your Audience

Divide your audience into groups based on demographics, interests, behavior, and engagement. This segmentation helps you create targeted and personalized strategies that resonate better with specific audience segments.

Data analytics enables marketers to craft these segments as you’ll be able to identify the right customers to add to each segment.

4. Monitor Performance Metrics

Next, you must regularly track the KPIs to gauge progress toward your campaign goals. For example, an agency can use analytics to track marketing data analytics KPIs such as website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, and social media engagement.

5. Optimize Marketing Strategies

Use data analytics to refine your marketing strategies. Allocate resources to the most effective channels, tweak messaging to connect with your audience, and assess the performance of different media channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). Evaluate how your ads perform and impact business metrics like website traffic, leads, and conversions.

If you’re using social media, use social media analytics tools to track your progress. Similarly, invest in third-party analytics tools that can give you advanced features like predictive analytics that can help you create targeted marketing campaigns.

Some of the tools you can choose include:

• AWeber
• Buffer
• Kissmetrics
• Optimizely
• MixPanel

6. Leverage A/B Testing

A/B testing allows you to experiment with different campaign variations and determine the most effective strategies. Clearly define objectives, test one variable at a time, and ensure a sufficient sample size for reliable results.

Regularly monitor and analyze tests to make data-driven decisions. Also, keep in mind that A/B testing is a continuous process so keep doing it regularly to get valuable insights that can drive your strategy’s results.

7. Personalize Customer Experiences

Personalization drives better customer outcomes. When your marketing is more relevant to a customer’s preferences, they’ll be likely to react positively to it.

In fact, 71% of consumers expect brands to personalize their experiences. Additionally, 76% of them get frustrated if a brand doesn’t personalize their experience.

Image via McKinsey

This makes it important for you to consider the needs and preferences of your audience before crafting marketing messaging for them. And this is yet another aspect where data analytics can help you out. Using the insights you gather from it, you can personalize your marketing to deliver elevated customer experiences.

How Do Companies Use Analytics to Improve Their Marketing Campaigns?

One of the best ways to find out how to get the most benefits from analytics to improve your marketing campaigns is to learn from leading companies. Let’s take a look at some examples that may inspire you.

Netflix: Personalized Content Recommendations

Netflix uses analytics to personalize content recommendations for the users. The company  analyzes viewers' past watch history, preferences, and even the time of day they watch to suggest movies and TV shows tailored to individual tastes. This has led to increased user engagement and retention.

What’s more?

By leveraging data analytics, Netflix also changes the thumbnails for the content on their platform to appeal to a particular user.

Image via Becoming Human

Amazon: Dynamic Pricing

Amazon uses pricing analytics to regulate product prices in real-time. They consider factors like competitor pricing, demand, and historical data to optimize prices and maximize profitability. The dynamic pricing strategy of Amazon ensures they will always remain competitive on the market.

Starbucks: Loyalty Program Optimization

Starbucks uses data analytics to optimize its loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards. They analyze customer purchase data to understand buying patterns and preferences. This information helps them send personalized offers and recommendations to customers, increasing customer loyalty and sales.

FAQs

Q1. Why is data analytics important in marketing strategy?

A. Data analytics plays a key role in marketing strategy by helping you understand what’s clicking with your customers and what isn’t. Based on these insights, you can improve your strategy and launch effective marketing campaigns that deliver results. You can use web analytics tools to analyze your data.

Q2. How big data analytics affects marketing strategy?

A. Big data analytics helps you make sense of the aspects of your current marketing strategy that are working. By making sense of your data, you can inform your marketing strategy and improve your campaign results.

Q3. How can marketers use big data and marketing analytics to improve marketing strategies?

A. Marketers can use big data to get a detailed understanding of their customers and prospects. Based on this, they can then modify their marketing, pricing strategies, channel choices, and more to attract and retain customers.

Q4. In what ways can data analytics impact strategy?

A. Data analytics provides you with a comprehensive picture of your audience and marketing strategy’s performance. This helps you change your approach to improve your results.

Q5. What is the relationship between data analytics and strategic marketing?

A. Strategic marketing is an approach that incorporates data-driven decision making to create and implement digital marketing strategies. Data analytics is the mode through which marketers can get access to these actionable insights to make strategic decisions.

Conclusion

Marketing analytics is an important tool for marketing success. It acts as a guide for businesses, helping them improve their marketing campaigns in a more efficient way. By using the power of analytics, marketers can boost their understanding of customer behavior and optimize their strategies to generate higher revenues.

From segmentation and monitoring to strategy optimization and personalization, data analytics can help you with it all.

Also, you can take a leaf out of the strategies employed by leading businesses in the world and learn how to improve your marketing strategies by using data analytics.

So, go ahead and start giving your marketing campaigns a boost.