The Fundamentals of a Marketing Analytics Strategy

As your business grows, so too does the importance of marketing analytics. An effective marketing analytics strategy is essential for being able to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and their contribution to your growth goals, enabling you to determine the return on investment you're getting from marketing activities such as social media campaigns.

Marketing analytics allows you to gain insights into what's working and what isn't, enabling you to make informed, data-driven decisions about where to allocate resources and how to adjust your marketing mix. It also allows marketing teams to track progress and measure success over time. This is essential for understanding whether your marketing efforts are paying off and for making course corrections along the way.

A marketing analytics strategy should be tailored to your specific business goals. But there are some general best practices that all businesses should follow.

Here are a few tips for putting together an effective marketing analytics strategy:

• Define your marketing goals and objectives. What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts? Be as specific as possible. It can be as simple as reaching a certain traffic level, conversion rate, or a certain amount of sales -- or as complex as defining expected acquisition costs for a multi-stage funnel with expected conversion rates for each step.

• Choose the right marketing metrics. Not all metrics are created equal. Some are universal for all business types, such as overall traffic and search engine rankings. Others are business-specific, such as ROAS for ecommerce businesses or "deal creation rate" for B2B companies with a multi-step sales process. Select those that are most relevant to your marketing goals and objectives, make a clear definition of each one, and determine how you will track it.

• Set up tracking and reporting. This will help you collect the data you need to monitor your marketing progress and make informed decisions. Think about the technology stack you will use carefully, as it may be difficult (or costly) to switch in the future -- but don't splurge on expensive analytics tools up that have advanced analytics features you cannot effectively utilize, either. Most businesses don't need real-time analytics, for example. In many cases, there is also no need for multi-touch attribution -- this only becomes important as higher levels of scale where you'll have enough data to be able to get effective insights about the contribution of each channel.

• Analyze your data regularly. This will allow you to identify trends and make adjustments to your marketing strategy as needed. Review the performance of your marketing activities at least monthly. If you're spending significant amounts on digital advertising, review the performance weekly to ensure you're not wasting money unnecessarily.

A marketing analytics strategy is essential for any business that wants to scale successfully. By following these tips, you can set your business up for success.

Do you need help putting together a marketing analytics strategy, deciding on marketing analytics tools, or getting the most of the tools you have chosen? We can help. Contact us today to learn more about how our marketing consulting services can help you reach your growth targets and get the most out of your marketing campaigns.