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Marketing analytics platforms are one of the most important tools for business owners to refine their advertising campaigns in the digital marketplace. Analytics platforms have helped millions of businesses understand their customer base. They allow for businesses to serve their customers better by informing business owners what their customers like best. Here are some of the best approaches for making marketing analytics platforms work.
Turn Context Into Conversions
Marketing analytics platforms allow you to focus on turning context into conversions. A conversion is when a customer sees an advertisement and takes a desired action. Typically, this means that a customer saw an ad, clicked on it, then bought the advertised product or service. For example, an 8% conversion rate means that 8 customers out of every 100 that saw an ad and took a desired action. Context is a marketing tactic to increase conversions that can be greatly enhanced with software. Since different customers will respond differently in different environments, good market analytics allows business owners to fine tune their marketing to suit each customer in each environment.
Using Data To Understand Customers
More so, you should use a data driven approach with marketing analytics programs. A given business’ customers can come in all shapes and sizes, and properly analyzing customer data is the best way to understand the needs of customers. For example, demand forecasting can be used to anticipate customer needs and prevent product or service shortages. Historical data can be used to predict trends and adapt to changing customer needs. Cross-referencing data points can be used to infer what new products or services a customer base is more likely to enjoy. Marketing data analytics tools are a way to understand customers so a business can adapt to a market.
The Key Performance Indicators Approach
Powerful marketing platforms leverage the right kind of data, called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A major KPI is the cost per lead statistic. The higher the cost per lead, the more wasteful a marketing campaign is. A statistic like lifetime customer value can inform how many customers get turned in to long term, recurring customers. Social media engagement is a KPI that determines how popular a brand is among internet users. While many different KPIs vary in importance to different businesses, understanding each performance indicator allows businesses to focus on what matters to them.
Maximize Your Return On Investment
Furthermore, maximize your marketing ROI with benchmarks you set with the software. Every data collection avenue requires an investment of time and money, but some have better returns than others. For example, email is consistently one of the cheapest ways to market digitally and also has the highest rate of return. Customers may respond better to a flashy, expensive ad campaign, but the investment rate will be much higher. Gathering data from the right sources to maintain data hygiene cuts down on waste, since no junk data will pollute the analytics. As with anything else in business, finding a high return on investment approach is key.
Exercise Proper Data Hygiene
Marketing data programs can be a valuable tool, but they may require an emphasis on accuracy. For business owners to get the most value from their marketing analytics, they need to ensure that the data is being delivered in a proper format. This means collecting enough data to ensure a representative data set, and also collecting data regularly enough to avoid working with outdated information. Any duplicate or incorrect information should be eliminated from the data set. These processes should be automated, since manually keeping a large dataset organized and up to date is time consuming. Practicing proper data hygiene is how experienced marketers avoid wasting time and money with junk data.
Marketing analytics platforms are an important and influential tool for navigating the digital business space. When used well, these platforms can refine already existing sites to increase conversion rates. They allow business owners to understand and adapt to their customer base. They let businesses set goals according to what data points they choose to prioritize and give marketing campaigns direction. Used efficiently, they can make a business succeed where it might have failed. As long as business owners understand and implement the best practices, marketing analytics platforms are a critical part of any marketing infrastructure.
