Marketing analytics as a tool for effective business development

Stable and effective development of any business is largely the result of comprehensive development, creation of the most effective strategy. But it is also a consequence of constant monitoring, collection and processing of indicators indicating how much the real picture coincides with the planned figures. Marketing analytics is designed to provide significant assistance in performing these works. Today, it has already become a standard practice for many business representatives, as it gives excellent results and minimizes potential risks, increases work efficiency, reduces material and labor costs.

With the help of specialized tools, it will be possible to collect and analyze key parameters for marketing, study your target audience, and create its profile. But this will only be possible if you approach the implementation of this idea as comprehensively and professionally as possible. This means that it is important to thoroughly understand such an issue as marketing analytics.

We will dwell on this in detail in today's review. In particular, we will talk about why marketing analytics is needed for modern business. We will highlight the range of tasks that one is called upon to cope with effectively. We will get acquainted with the main types of this strategy and its indicators. We will talk about how the analytics process is organized in modern marketing and what tools can be used to implement the tasks. We will tell you what role analytics plays in online marketing and digital strategies, as well as how to use it with maximum benefit for your business. The information provided will allow you to dive deep into this issue and launch a marketing strategy within your business.

Why does marketing need analytics?

Marketing analytics is a comprehensive study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of your business's marketing activities and determining the stability of business development in the market. With an impressive amount of information, business representatives will be able to understand what exactly contributes to the influx of customers into the business, learn how to improve the efficiency of their own work, ensure a return on investment, which will be the key to obtaining good and stable profits.

Absolutely any modern business should adopt marketing analytics because:

• We are talking about a truly advanced technique. Today, over 85% of all global marketers use analytical data to track company performance and effectively promote the official online representation of the business in search results.
• This is a unique opportunity to get many more clients than competitors who do not use these tools in practice. According to research on the number of buyers, there is a 20-fold advantage here.
• Modern consumers have become more demanding of businesses. In particular, they expect more individual offers, personal products, and discounts from the company. How else can you find out the interests of the audience if you do not collect information about it?
• In this case, you will have a fairly impressive set of information, which will allow you to make the most appropriate and balanced decision on subsequent actions, guaranteeing more effective business development.

Agree, the arguments are more than significant. This means that it is time to get to know marketing analytics, key indicators and tools in more detail.

Purpose of marketing analytics

Any business that uses marketing analytics in its daily activities will be able to solve a number of key tasks facing it. In particular, we are talking about such works as:

1. Evaluation of the effectiveness of launched marketing strategies today and in the foreseeable future. Having the collected information, you will be able to understand how effectively your content marketing has worked, understand whether advertising brings in clients, in which regions it is effective, and where it is not. You will also be able to understand whether the invested funds are paying off, highlight those parameters by which competitors are bypassing you.
2. Identifying those advertising channels that turn out to be the most effective in practice. That is, you will understand where new customers come from and what contributes to this. Alternatively, this could be effective SEO or vice versa, contextual or targeted advertising, email newsletters, social networks, affiliate marketing, attracting opinion leaders, productive work of offline representative offices, etc. This knowledge will allow you to optimize material costs, directing them more to those channels that give the best results in practice.
3. Drawing up a complete portrait of the target audience in order to understand who you should focus on in your business as a whole. Here you can create selections by various parameters, such as age, gender, place of residence, interests, etc. This is what will allow you to launch effective targeting and prepare personalized offers.
4. Evaluation of the cost of attracting new customers. You will understand how much one new buyer costs you, and also understand the feasibility of such work. It may turn out that some channels on which you placed high hopes and invested considerable sums do not give the desired result, while others, from which the audience really comes, remain underfunded.
5. Identification of those advertising creatives that worked best in practice. You can use both A/B testing and analytical tools to evaluate the company's launched ads to identify the most converting ads. Then they can be scaled, increasing the efficiency of the work.
6. Identification of weak points in the sales chain and their elimination. It may well turn out that certain employees of your company need refresher courses, or problems with the website will be identified, the quality of a certain batch of goods will be low, or the delivery period will be too long for buyers.
7. Adjusting the marketing budget by redistributing it to those channels that provide the maximum number of leads by withdrawing funds from ineffective strategies. If you see that an e-mail newsletter is not producing results, why waste time and effort on it? It would be more expedient to take its budget and invest it in social networks, from which buyers come to you.

That is, professionally implemented marketing analytics is what will allow you to improve your own strategy, adapt it to constantly changing market trends and current conditions, audience interest. Thanks to these works, you will be able to keep the development of your business under complete control, which will certainly give excellent results in practice.

The main types of marketing analytics

Modern marketing uses different types of analytics depending on its source, direction of analysis. So, depending on these indicators, the following categories are distinguished:

1. CRM analytics.
2. Web analytics.
3. End-to-end analytics.
4. Competitive analytics.
5. Product analytics.

Each of these categories must be considered in as much detail as possible in order to understand the difference between them and learn how to use them correctly in practice.

CRM analytics

CRM analytics — technology that involves automatic collection of sales data, results of marketing campaigns, and their comparison with invested funds. It is designed to solve the following problems facing businesses:

• Improving interaction with the consumer audience. Modern CRM systems are able to collect information about the duration of the "life" of the buyer, the average time between orders, the number of failed transactions, profit indicators, including from each individual client. Here you can also get detailed information about all stages of the sales funnel.
• Control over the work of managers and increase their productivity. The CRM system provides detailed information on each individual specialist. Here you can see the total duration of working time for the period under study, find out how much time it took him to lead the buyer through the sales chain. Information on call statistics, quality and speed of customer service will also be available. As a result, it will be possible to determine what income each individual employee brought to the company and more.
• Analysis of business financial indicators. Almost any modern CRM system will contain detailed information about all the company's income and expenses, sales figures. All this data will be displayed in real time. You can also get final reports on what profit a particular product or service brought in during the period under study.
• Optimization of investments in marketing development. The information that will be at your disposal thanks to the CRM system will help you see the overall picture of the state of the business, calculate its profitability, customer acquisition costs and many other indicators that you will need for subsequent analysis.
• Collecting information on customer behavioral factors. This is what will allow you to see which products from your catalog are in high demand among the audience, which aspects of cooperation are the most complained about, and which, on the contrary, contribute to leaving positive reviews.

There is a huge variety of CRM systems on the modern market, which differ in functionality and price. As an option, the following solutions deserve attention: Bitrix 24, Megaplan, AmoCRM, SBER CRM, etc.

Web analytics

Web analytics involves collecting data from Internet pages and their subsequent analysis to obtain a clear picture of the site visitors and their behavior on the pages, interests and preferences. This area will include the following studies:

• Analysis of site traffic. You will see changes in traffic in real time, you will be able to analyze when there are surges in activity, and when, on the contrary, there is a complete lull.
• Analysis of user behavior on the portal. Here, important indicators will be the average time each visitor spends, the number of pages they visited, and their depth. This will allow you to identify the most visited pages and understand what exactly interested potential buyers in them. Here you can track a huge number of indicators, right down to which buttons a person pressed.
• Traffic channel analysis. Web analytics will allow you to understand which channels bring in the most visitors, and which, on the contrary, do not provide traffic. Here you can analyze social networks, email newsletters, external links, advertising, etc.
• Creating a portrait of the target audience. You will be able to understand who makes up the majority of your buyers: men or women, their age, place of residence and many other criteria.
• Comprehensive analysis. This is a kind of combination of all the previous points, allowing you to understand how effectively the audience interacts with your site and take a number of measures aimed at increasing functionality, improving the design, text and graphic content, usability of the site.

To receive all the necessary data within the framework of web analytics, you will only need to connect the Yandex Metrica counter to your site. This must be done for each individual page to obtain the most complete and detailed information.

End-to-end analytics

End-to-end analytics is an analysis method that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of financial investments in marketing. It is carried out using a detailed study of the customer's overall path, starting from their very first interaction with the company or its product and up to repeat purchases. With its help, you can:

• Get all the information you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing channels. You will see expenses and income for each of them, which will allow you to compare them and make simple conclusions about the effectiveness of a particular option in terms of attracting customers.
• Analyze the entire sales cycle, receive detailed reports on funnels, tracking the effectiveness of each individual stage. That is, you will be able to understand what the result itself was, how many deals were concluded, but also how many clients "fell through", at what stage and why this happened.
• Optimize your own investments in business in order to get the maximum result from them. This is achieved by redistributing funds and directing them to those channels that give the maximum result.
• Speed up management decision-making. Literally in real time, you will see the current state of your business, be able to identify its strengths and weaknesses, and use the information obtained to improve the situation and, as a result, increase profits.

Like web analytics, end-to-end research is also available in the Yandex Metrica service. But if you wish, you can also use other software solutions, such as Callibri, Calltouch, Roistat, etc.

Competitive analytics

Competitive analytics is a comprehensive market analysis aimed at identifying players in the same niche in which your company operates. A special advantage of this solution is that in this case, a business is identified that is commensurate in size with yours. That is, real competitors are identified. Such research allows you to solve the following problems:

• Conducting a comprehensive analysis of other companies, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. This is what will allow you to improve your own business and minimize errors that lead to a decrease in work efficiency.
• Search for new ideas for development in the market. This can be done through a comprehensive analysis of competitors' services and products. As a result, you will be able to find products that will allow you to become a leader in a fairly narrow niche, thereby increasing the efficiency of your business.
• Formation of a powerful unique technical offer of your business. If you clearly understand the strengths and weaknesses of your closest competitors, you will be able to present your business in the most favorable light, emphasizing those advantages that other companies do not have.

To conduct competitive analytics, you can use the following services: SpyWords, SimilarWeb, Popsters, SemRush, etc.

Product analytics

Product analytics is a completely unique approach to product development, which involves comprehensive data collection and processing. During its implementation, we study how the target audience interacts with your product, how satisfied it is, whether it meets expectations, and whether it can solve the customer's pain points. In particular, it involves:

• A detailed analysis of the behavioral factors of potential buyers. It reveals how people interact with the product, website, and system as a whole. It identifies the indicators that play a key role for the business.
• Monitoring the quality of the product and its compliance with user requests. It is carried out based on the collection and analysis of customer feedback. As a result, the current position of the product is determined, and potential growth points are identified.
• Determining the material costs of promoting the product. In this case, it is important to understand how much it will cost you to sell it, and what profit can theoretically be made. Then, the costs are compared with the potential benefits and the feasibility of promoting the product is determined.
• Testing several products before launching them on the market in order to determine the option that the target audience will appreciate best. It is carried out by conducting A/B testing. Several hypotheses are launched and the effectiveness of each of them is checked. In the future, the work is taken on the option where the results are higher.

That is, this way it will be possible to identify those products that will be in demand among potential buyers and subsequently put more effort into their promotion on the market.

Indicators that are used in marketing analytics

To understand how your business is developing, whether it is moving in the right direction, whether the invested funds are justified, it is important to focus directly on the numbers. In particular, all those indicators that will be relevant in this case can be divided into 2 separate groups:

1. Absolute.
2. Relative.

Now we will consider the parameters that are included in each of these groups and how to calculate them correctly.

Absolute indicators of marketing analytics

The main indicators that will be collected and analyzed during marketing analytics include:

1. Sales volume. Indicates how many goods or services were sold during the studied time period. This indicator has a direct impact on the company's income, allows you to identify the goods that bring the most profit and, conversely, the least.
2. Profit. This indicator can be easily calculated. To do this, you will need to subtract all expenses from the total income. It is best to calculate profit not for the entire company, but for a separate area or even product. This will allow you to identify channels that can bring losses even if the company itself is considered profitable.
3. Number of clients. This is the total number of people who have performed a particular target action in your company. Alternatively, this could be an order for a service, a purchase of a product, a subscription payment, etc. To obtain the most accurate indicators here, you can use one of the CRM systems. But the main thing here is to clearly distinguish between regular customers and new buyers.
4. Brand awareness. It is used to determine how well the target audience is familiar with your company. In order to obtain such a figure, it will be necessary to perform a comprehensive analysis of all mentions, including brand search queries. This work can be done manually by monitoring the media, social networks. But you can also use specialized tools.

Relative indicators of marketing analytics

Relative indicators in marketing analytics include the following data:

1. Market share. A characteristic that displays the share of sales of your company in comparison with the total number of sales in your market niche. Determined as a percentage. To find out, you will need to divide your sales in monetary terms by the total market sales and multiply by 100%. This will help you understand what place your business occupies in the market and, as a result, evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing strategies used and take a number of measures to improve them.
2. Customer lifetime value. This characteristic indicates how much income the same person will bring to the business over the entire period of interaction with him. To calculate it, you need to multiply the average purchase receipt by the frequency of purchases per month and also by the number of months during which this person remains your client. As a result, you will get the total amount that this person brought to your business. To understand whether your business is operating at a loss, you will need to compare the customer lifetime value and the cost of attracting a new customer. It is clear that the first indicator should be higher.
3. Cost of attracting a new customer. Indicates the total amount of material resources that the company allocates to get one client. In this case, it is necessary to divide the total marketing costs by the number of clients attracted. If you do not use other channels of attraction except advertising, then here you need to divide the costs of launching ads by the number of clients. It is advisable to carry out such calculations for each advertising channel in order to understand which of them works more effectively in practice, and which - less. Let us repeat that this metric should be analyzed together with the previous option, that is, with the lifetime value of the client.
4. Conversion. By this characteristic we mean the ratio of the total number of site visitors who performed a particular target action on it to the total number of visitors. As an option, this can be the purchase of goods or services, adding a product to the basket, viewing a particular page several times, filling out a feedback form and other actions that will be characteristic of your business. The higher the conversion rate, the better it will be for your business.
5. Average purchase receipt. This indicator indicates the amount of money on average a buyer spends per visit to your company. To calculate it, you need to divide the company's total revenue for a certain period of time by the total number of orders placed during these days. The average purchase receipt is directly related to the profitability of advertising and other investments in business development. This means that it is important for companies to strive to increase it.
6. Click-through rate. This parameter is defined as the ratio of the number of people who clicked on the link in your ad to the total number of ad impressions. The resulting figure will need to be multiplied by 100%. Accordingly, the higher the click-through rate, the more interesting and attractive your ad is to the target audience.
7. Return on investment. This indicator can be called the final one, as it shows what profit the business receives from the invested costs. It can be calculated both for the company as a whole and for a separate advertising project. To calculate it, you need to subtract the costs from the project income, then divide the resulting figure by the same costs and multiply by 100%. If you get a figure below 100%, this will indicate that advertising or any other investment is unprofitable.

As you can see, there are quite a lot of parameters, and they are really important. But you should not have any problems with their calculation. A data collection can be easily automated using specialized services.

How Marketing Analytics Works

The entire marketing analytics process can be divided into 4 main stages:

1. Data collection. Most of it is performed automatically. The main sources used here are the company's official website, advertising systems and related platforms that the business uses in its work, CRM systems. It is important to consider all sources here, because ignoring at least one of them can cause a budget drain.
2. Data processing and analysis of results. And at this stage, the main metrics are assessed, which will indicate the effectiveness of all those campaigns that your business uses. This includes both online and offline events. All the indicators we discussed above are calculated, and the resulting figures are compared with the forecasted ones. This allows you to assess business development trends and understand whether it is necessary to make adjustments to the strategy to improve its effectiveness.
3. Visualization, interpretation of information. At this stage, visual reports are generated. Dashboards and infographics are compiled. This is what makes the analysis more convenient, allows you to perform a simple comparison, including for different time intervals, and draw correct conclusions. By interpreting information, we mean determining which channels in practice give the best results for promotion, which are worse, what measures will help optimize advertising campaigns and improve their effectiveness.
4. Decision making. At this stage, you will already have all the necessary information at your disposal, collected and structured. All that remains is to make a final decision on each of the marketing channels. Development plans and strategies are already being developed here. They also determine which indicators have improved and which still leave much to be desired, and select a priority direction for development.

Thanks to such a step-by-step implementation, marketing analytics allows you to create truly working and promising business development strategies, since they are based on volumetric and real indicators.

Main tools of marketing analytics

Modern marketing analytics has a fairly wide variety of programs, specialized services, the action of which is aimed at faster and more convenient collection of information from various sources and its subsequent processing, analysis. So, these can be:

• Analytics systems. Here users get access to standard and customized reports containing information about website traffic, traffic sources, marketing campaign efficiency, target audience, etc. Using the capabilities of such systems, you can organize the data and get reports that will exactly match the specifics of your business.
• Advertising systems. So you will have at your disposal all the data about launched advertising campaigns, which will allow you to analyze the efficiency of launched ads at different levels. Alternatively, you can create reports by geolocation, by key queries, by landing pages, etc. The information obtained will allow you to evaluate the profitability of the advertising campaign as a whole, redistribute budgets so that more funds go to those areas that give the best results in practice, disabling ineffective ones.
• CRM systems. All client bases of your business are stored here, which will allow you to form individual offers for each individual buyer taking into account their preferences and interests. It will also be possible to study the sales funnel step by step, segment the audience into separate groups, be it place of residence, number of purchases made, traffic channel. All reports can be generated depending on clients, managers, transactions.
• BI platforms. This software is designed to collect, as well as subsequent processing and analysis of large arrays of data. The specificity of such platforms is that they can receive data from absolutely any systems that are connected to them: analytics systems, advertising networks, marketing tools, CRM systems, etc. In automatic mode, all the information received is transformed into visual reports. You yourself configure the option that will be most typical for your business. It is also possible to make forecasts.

All these platforms are presented on the modern market in a wide variety. You can easily choose the right option for yourself, paying attention to the functionality and price.

What role does analytics play in modern marketing and digital strategies?

All the information that you manage to collect during the marketing analytics can be used in various directions and to solve a wide range of problems:

• Creating content that will best match the interests of the target audience, its geolocation, gender, age and related data. That is, thanks to the preliminary research, you will understand who your publications should be targeted at.
• The most accurate launch of targeted and contextual advertising. It is impossible to ensure this without a clear understanding of the portrait of your target audience. During the research, you will be able to determine a huge number of parameters that will allow you to make sufficiently personalized offers.
• Efficient SEO promotion. Without detailed information from the field of Internet analytics, it is impossible to implement competent search engine optimization. Now you will have detailed reports from Webmaster or Yandex Metrica, which will ultimately help with the formation of the semantic core. This will become the basis for the subsequent development of the site pages, their content. Moreover, you will be able to automatically monitor the dynamics of organic traffic, behavioral metrics and literally respond to changes in real time.
• E-mail newsletters. When preparing them, the information that the CRM system will transmit to you will be of significant help. Alternatively, this will be data on the customer base, their email addresses, phone numbers. That is, you will be able to inform the audience about new promotions, receipts, bonuses with minimal time and effort.

Marketing analytics will be useful for absolutely any business also because this way you will be able to keep all the processes occurring in the company under control, instantly responding to changes in interests and trends. This is what will guarantee high efficiency and minimize various errors.

Using marketing analytics - increasing business efficiency

The opportunities for your business growth in the market and its profit directly depend on how correctly you complete the upcoming work and learn to use the information collected during marketing analytics. In order for your work in this area to be as effective as possible and meet your expectations, adhere to the following recommendations:

1. Consider the smallest details and specifics of the business, because this is the only way you can choose the best channels for promotion and sales organization.
2. Connect to work all those systems and services that will help you collect the most comprehensive information about your target audience, advertising campaigns, sales. Here it is important to focus on working with all those channels that you use in practice. In the event that there are several marketing channels, if you need to scale them, then it will still be optimal to connect a good BI platform.
3. Do not forget to regularly collect information about competitors and the market as a whole. This way you will be able to adapt to changes, focusing on your own advantages over other companies operating in the same market niche as you.
4. Monitoring of analytical data should also be performed regularly. Basic connection of services will not be enough. You will have to learn how to work with standard reports, understand when you need to connect customized ones. You should also regularly check the current data against the planned ones.
5. With the information you receive, make adjustments to your own strategies as quickly as possible, increasing their efficiency and redistributing the budget.

All these works should be carried out constantly, because this is the only way you will not miss important moments that can give a new impetus to the development of your business.

Let's summarize

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