Analytics form a critical aspect in developing marketing strategies. According to a 2018 marketing data and analytics survey, 76% of marketing leaders base their decisions on data analytics.
That means it is quite hard to come by data-driven insights without analytical sensibility in marketing. However, it takes the best practices to make the most out of data and analytics in your marketing.
1. Customize Your Dashboards
Running various marketing campaigns at once may seem like an easy way to achieve your goals fast. However, this makes it easy to get distracted and lost in your dashboards.
For instance, having your email marketing analytics next to your pay per click analytics is a sure way of making costly mistakes.
Luckily, creating separate dashboards for every campaign can help you avoid such mix-ups. Most importantly, identify the goal of your dashboard and avoid tracking or analyzing too many metrics at once, as that will only complicate your reports.
Instead, identify the essential use cases so you can pay more attention to them when measuring the results.
However, you must invest in reliable marketing analytics and reporting tools for dashboard creation. The right software will help you bring important metrics closer and give you access to personalized and real-time reports per your preferred marketing metrics.
2. Pay Attention to Your Data Quality
The availability of unstructured consumer data is the biggest hindrance for marketers from making decisions. That is perhaps because the available superfluous materials cause marketers to overlook the most meaningful figures and waste a lot of time on unnecessary things.
To avoid this problem, marketers need to focus on collecting useful data that is easy to organize logically. An excellent way to do that is by ensuring that the analytics dashboard supplies graphs that make it easy to identify trends.
3. Monthly Analytics and Yearly Analytics Comparison
Most markers love to compare their month-to-month analytics. And while the idea helps to establish the marketing campaign’s effectiveness, it will help to compare the yearly analytics.
Taking your year-over-year marketing data into account gives you insights into the actual performance of your marketing effort.
For example, if your main focus is on email marketing, you will want to compare how the campaign has performed over the past 12 months.
If your company is more than one-year-old, it may also help to compare monthly stats from the previous year. That way, it becomes easy to tweak your promotional campaigns as you deem fit.
4. Select a Suitable Data Visualization Method
You may have a ton of quality data. But if you are not clear about the data projects’ insights, it is bound to be invaluable. This is where data visualization comes in.
Data visualization helps you find patterns and trends where you can extract valuable insights. Although it is cumbersome to interpret large volumes of data, it is much easier to act upon well-presented data.
It would be best to analyze your data charts before taking any action. Therefore, when selecting an analytics platform, avoid the fanciest visualization charts. Instead, choose one that offers effective data visualization to help you develop a compelling interpretation of your data.
Final Thoughts
Analytics is the key to enhancing the whole customer journey and ensuring successful marketing. However, you must be willing to put in the hard work so you can achieve the intended goals of your marketing campaign.The good thing is that adopting the best marketing analytic practices will take away the burden in your marketing efforts and bring about the prosperity you need.
