Marketing costs on average consume about 11 percent of a company’s budget. These costs are much higher in industries like consumer packaged goods, where they can take up to 25 percent of the overall budget on average. While marketing is an essential part of growing a business, it can also be expensive. It’s possible for enterprises to improve marketing performance by incorporating more data analytics.
Develop More Nuanced Ideal Customer Profiles
When it comes to marketing and sales, ideal customer profiles are going to be an essential part of the conversations in most industries. This is because developing ideal customer profiles remains a critical part of identifying the people who are worth targeting with your marketing budget. Simply put, you’re going to save a lot of time and money if you can reach the right people.
There are a few ways marketing data analytics can help develop stronger ideal customer profiles. In doing this, it’s essential to gather as much demographic and non-personal identifying information as possible about customers. Running analyses on and keeping track of these demographics can help to constantly refine your ideal customer profiles. Information such as customer age, location, and income are of course going to be relevant, but not all-encompassing.
For an even deeper understanding of your customers, marketing data analytics can help you find more nuanced patterns and trends. For instance, you might find certain customers in a certain area buy certain goods twice as much during the month of February. Understanding the meaning behind that trend can help marketers run far more cost-effective campaigns.
It’s also wise to look at lifetime customer value through this lens, as that can play a significant role in building long-term brand enthusiasts while also lowering customer acquisition costs. The bottom line is marketers can be far more effective with their budget when given the right analytics tools, which leads to more sales and higher margins.
Follow Campaign Performance in Real-Time
In the past, analyzing a marketing campaign was more like reading tealeaves than performing an evidence-based investigation. This might be why the classic representation of an ad team, Mad Men style, seems to involve the heavy consumption of alcohol. Today, marketing teams can dissect campaigns with surgical precision without needing an afternoon pick-me-up. But this is only the beginning of what’s possible with marketing data analytics.
Of course, marketing campaigns require thorough investigation after they’ve run their course. Now, however, the analysis doesn’t need to wait for the post-op, but can happen right along with the campaign itself. Real-time analytics can be hugely valuable for marketers when used in this way.
Let’s say, for example, a brand is running a holiday sale around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is the most important time of year for many retailers. Real-time marketing analytics can allow for teams to call an audible in the middle of a campaign if they’re seeing something that’s not quite right.
It could be something as simple as customers abandoning their carts at a higher frequency due to an extra step in the checkout process. Being able to identify that in the moment, as opposed to after the fact, has the potential to save campaigns that otherwise could have become a disaster.
Ad Hoc Capabilities for All
When you think of data analytics, you probably think of someone who does that as their whole job, not a marketer. But as you can clearly see, marketing teams have a clear incentive for running their own internal analyses for problems within their scope of competence. Herein lies the argument for greater data democratization, by giving analytics capabilities to more team members.
The previous example of needing to make on-the-fly changes to a marketing campaign perfectly shows why ad hoc analytics is a powerful tool in the hands of everyday employees. There’s no way someone could have sent an analytics request and received the answer fast enough to effectively change that campaign as it was ongoing before the emergence of ad hoc. Enabling employees with greater analytics capabilities can allow for much more flexible in-the-moment decision-making, which is essential for marketing teams today.
There are some pretty clear ways data analytics can improve marketing performance. Outfitting your team with the right tools can help them take their performance to the next level.
