How We Use Marketing Data Analytics to Help Your Business

Most business owners know that digital marketing is no longer optional. In most industries, whether or not you’re doing most of your business online, doing business at all means doing some form of digital marketing.

What many businesses don’t know is that without the use of marketing data analytics, their marketing efforts will almost certainly fall short. Without proper analytics, marketing efforts are nothing more than a shot in the dark, with no clear way to determine what’s working and what’s wasting valuable resources.

While the prospect of getting started with marketing data analytics can seem like a lot, they are the only reliable way to assess whether your marketing strategy is working or not. If you’re not tracking key metrics, deepening your understanding of customer behavior, and identifying trends in your marketing efforts, your business could likely be making a much larger impact.

Keep reading to find out how marketing analytics can transform your business, or give Baal & Spots a call at (832) 662-7725 today to get started.

What is marketing data analytics?

Marketing data analytics involves the systematic collection, processing, and analysis of all data related to marketing activities. These analytics can encompass data from everywhere your brand has an online presence, but mostly come from your website, your social media channels, email campaigns, and e-commerce stores.

Data analytics describes not just the collection and analysis of this data, but the process of putting it to use to achieve your marketing goals and, ultimately, position your business for growth.

Most businesses who aren’t taking advantage of their marketing analytics likely see it as extra work, but this data all exists whether your business is leveraging it or not. By analyzing your marketing data, your business can gain valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and trends to help you make sound marketing decisions and better structure your marketing spend.

Importance of data analytics in marketing strategies

There are innumerable benefits to tracking and analyzing your marketing data, but some of the most significant include:

More efficiency. Properly leveraging data analytics helps identify which marketing channels and strategies are working best, which allows your business to allocate resources more efficiently and eliminate wasteful spending on marketing efforts that aren’t moving the needle.
Increased conversion rates. Good data helps you understand customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to meet customer needs more effectively. You want to remove all barriers to your audience engaging with your product, which will lead to higher conversion rates.
Better customer experiences. Marketing analytics can help you segment your audience and target individual customers more effectively. More personalized marketing means more satisfaction and increased customer loyalty.
Improved ROI. Ultimately, you’re turning to analytic insights to increase your ROI. The most important benefit of leveraging analytics is optimizing your marketing campaigns so you can get better results with less spend.

Doing search engine marketing without leveraging key marketing data analytics is like driving a car blindfolded — you might be moving forward, but you’ll never be able to tell if you’re going in the right direction.

How do you use digital marketing analytics?

So why don’t many businesses leverage analytics for their marketing efforts? Honestly, because it can be hard to do without expert assistance. The learning curve can be steep for identifying and collecting the right data, but it can be even more steep for analyzing and acting on the data you collect.

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Incorporating digital marketing analytics into your marketing strategy usually involves a few key steps:

First, you need to identify which metrics are critical for your business. Your key metrics could be any combination of things ranging from conversion rates, web traffic, customer acquisition costs, engagement rates on social media, and more.
Collect data using a balance of marketing data analytics tools to understand the past, analyze the present, and help predict the future. Make sure to use a diverse suite of analytics tools to get an accurate and holistic view of your marketing efforts.
Figure out where you’re succeeding and, more importantly, where you need to improve. Identifying gaps in your capabilities is often the most helpful thing marketing analytics can do for your business.
Use that data to inform change. It might surprise you to find out that this is often the most difficult part of the analytics cycle; change is hard, and deciding to shake things up is something that you should not take lightly — but without your business taking action, marketing data analytics are just a bunch of big numbers and pretty charts.

Marketing data analytics tools

Using multiple marketing data analytics tools is essential to effectively collect and analyze any analytics. No single tool provides a complete picture of your marketing performance, and looking at only one side of the story can often lead to short-sighted decisions.

At Baal & Spots, not only do we leverage multiple tools to pull data from a number of sources, but we also use these tools as failsafes for one another by reviewing each tool’s accuracy against all of our data.

Knowing how to integrate and position these tools to work together is one of the most difficult things about incorporating data analysis into your marketing strategy, and a full rundown on it might put you to sleep, but an overview of some essential marketing analytics tools would include:

Web analytics tools	Tools like Google analytics provide insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion paths, helping you understand how visitors interact with your site. For more advanced users who want to further customize and automate your data, Mixpanel is an incredibly powerful tool for data visualization and presentation.
SEO tools	Platforms like SEMrush or Ahrefs offer data on keyword rankings, backlinks, and site audits. Make sure you verify your SEO tool’s findings with actual search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Social media analytics tools	Tools like Sprout Social and Buffer track engagement metrics across social media platforms. With these insights into audience demographics and content performance, you can tailor your social media content to get better results.
Marketing automation tools	Active Campaign and Klaviyo are two marketing automation platforms that can make your email marketing life much easier. Good marketing automation can help you nurture leads, track performance, and further determine characteristics that define your audience.

By combining these tools, businesses can ensure they are not only collecting relevant data but also turning it into actionable insights — especially in areas like SEO, where frequently acting on data-driven insights can be the difference between page 1 and page 10.

Continue reading about getting started with SEO:

What are the 4 types of data analytics in marketing?

Analytics is an extremely broad term that is used to describe essentially any important marketing data that your business is collecting. There are countless ways to segment this data, but one of the most popular methodologies involves dividing marketing analytics into the following four pillars:

Descriptive analytics focuses on summarizing historical data to understand what has happened in the past. They involve analyzing data to identify trends and patterns to provide a clear picture of past performance.
Diagnostic analytics delve deeper to understand why certain events occurred. By examining data relationships and correlations, diagnostic analytics help identify the root causes of specific outcomes or trends.
Predictive analytics use the historical data of prescriptive analytics and the statistical modeling of diagnostic analytics to forecast future outcomes. Predictive analytics predict customer behaviors, trends, and performance of future campaigns.
Prescriptive analytics take predictive analytics a step further by providing recommendations for future campaigns. Prescriptive analytics often utilize AI and machine learning to suggest adjustments to marketing strategies, but can also come from regular, human analysis of predictive analytics.

The analytics that your business could be collecting and acting upon only become more impactful as they get more complex. Historical data is good, but diagnostic analysis is better; predictive data is great, but prescriptive analysis will help take your marketing efforts to the next level. Marketing analytics can be tough, but the good news is that you don’t have to go it alone.

Need a marketing data analyst to take your business to the next level? Baal & Spots does that.

At Baal & Spots, we specialize in transforming complex data into actionable insights that drive business growth. Our team of marketing data analytics professionals is equipped with the latest tools and our time-tested methodologies, and is standing by to get to know your business.

Whether you’re looking for full-service content marketing services in Houston or just need a hand with social media management, we can help you understand your market, optimize your marketing strategies, and accomplish whatever goals you have in mind for your business.

Ready to harness the full potential of your marketing data? Let’s get started.