Making important choices can be difficult and confusing. Sometimes all we need is some guidance to get started.
Taking a data-driven marketing approach allows your company to improve the effectiveness of campaigns. It can enhance decision-making, improving reaction times to new trends.
Image Source
Marketing analytics tools make it possible for businesses to review their approaches in real-time and adapt to their customer’s needs immediately.
Using software properly benefits the growth of businesses and without it, you are likely to maintain a less than adequate standard of digital marketing techniques that grow stale quickly. The modern customer values immediacy, reliability, and personalization and there are many specific tools available to businesses to meet their client’s needs.
If you were a lawyer looking for the best apps for lawyers, you’d start by reading a guide. But how do you choose a marketing analytics tool? You’ve come to the right place, this professional guide will help you determine what your business needs and make the choice more straightforward.
Data – What’s So Important?
You must know whether your marketing approaches are working. Without information on engagement patterns and the effectiveness of campaigns, you are likely to lose customer interest.
Analyzing data can be difficult, but if done well it’s extremely effective.
It gives you an understanding of effectiveness immediately, which helps to react and differentiate your approaches straight away. Furthermore, whilst it helps greatly in the present, it also helps to plan for the future, predicting customer behavior and forthcoming trends.
Data is a buzzword, it gets used everywhere, but your business needs to put time and effort into differentiating between important information and things that will not benefit business growth whatsoever. What does data mean to your business and what does it look like?
Consider how you collect data and whether it benefits the company? If you have a lot of information but your marketing campaigns are struggling to engage customers, there is a disconnect between these two important parts of business growth and development.
Sifting through hundreds of data points about the levels of engagement in an email marketing campaign wastes time and resources.
This is where marketing analytics tools step in.
Marketing Analytics Tools
So what can they do for your company?
Here’s a list of some of the positives of adopting a great marketing analytics tool:
- It evaluates the performance of campaigns to identify new trends.
- Analyses customer behavior.
- Reviews business performance.
- And assess the effectiveness of individual channels.
Essentially, it allows you to develop a cycle of reviewing, understanding and improving.
Deciding
So it’s clear that analytics tools have great benefits, but what do you do about deciding what’s best for your business?
Let’s delve into that question and look at the capabilities a great tool should have.
Image Source
Building Actionable KPIs
The most important part of deciding is choosing how the tools will impact your KPIs.
Providing information such as ‘70% of Facebook users in your company’s group clicked on this link’ is interesting but how does it help?
This example would be more beneficial to your company:
The campaign on your Facebook group cost $2500. Engagement in posts increased to 70% from 65%, and 50% of clickers converted to sales. Of those sales, 30% were female, aged 25-30 and the remaining percentage were male aged 25-30.
Think about your product and the information it needs to enable it to create actionable KPIs.
Referring back to the example above, a company could decide that they are happy with the engagement from females on their page but would like to increase marketing to males. They would then look at previous data points where more males have engaged and create a campaign to engage them further.
Make sure the information that your tool provides is useful and you can form targets from it.
Centralizing Data
Imagine a startup remote support team that gathers data about potential clients from multiple sources. In the beginning, they only need to process smaller amounts of data into their system.
However, as the team grows and scales up, the job may become more demanding. The remote team’s wellness needs to be considered and therefore data gathering and management needs to be streamlined. The purpose of the system is to be able to process information. If your business is large and gathers a lot of data, your analytics tool needs to be able to handle it.
If your business is currently in the growth phase, make sure the software can scale up with your company’s development.
Standardization
Your company is likely to collect information in a lot of different ways. Consider how you collect data, is it solely through a website? Do you gather information through your social media pages as well, or by email? How will your business collect information in 12 months, does your tool need to be prepared for alteration in the methods?
Adopting different tools for different jobs can get messy, so think about the needs of your business and find a single analytics tool that can handle all of your information.
Many tools exist which do this without the need for external or internal data analyst involvement. So find one which can amalgamate your processes into one place, automatically, in a standardized form to make it easy for digestion and analysis.
Image Source
Clarity
Processing data and creating charts is a painstaking, inefficient process that costs money and time. Data analytics are helpful when they are easy to understand. The purpose is to improve how you market, so your marketing team needs to be able to comprehend the information which is being gathered.
If you are interested in sharing the information with other employees at your company, looking for a tool that can translate data into easy-to-read charts and graphs can be extremely helpful.
Customization
Over time the needs of businesses change. Viewing your data may look very different in the future so you need to prepare for that.
Your company is likely to collect a lot of different data. At some point, whether that is now, or in 12 months, you are going to have to take full advantage of all of the information available to you.
I like the analogy of a microscope. Right now, you may be looking at and using only the surface level of your data. Eventually, you are going to have to zoom right in and look at each part.
Being able to explore your data, filter information, and customize how you view it will help when it comes to solving problems in the present and future so look for a tool that lets you do this.
Test Driving
Investing in new software such as Vonage alternatives can be costly. It seems that every day there is a brand new technology entering the market that businesses ‘must’ invest in to be successful.
Just a quick word of advice here, but to reduce costs, some marketing analytics companies offer trial runs of software. Test it, review it, and then invest, not the other way around.
A great place to start is at a software test conference which will give you the most up-to-date, tested technology to meet your business needs.
Image Source
Compatibility
During the pandemic, the number of people searching phrases such as ‘Microsoft teams microphone not working windows 10’ has increased greatly. Often the issue is one of compatibility. Sometimes, the systems or hardware which we have at the time don’t work with modern solutions.
It’s important to consider the software available and how it suits the current systems you use. If your systems are outdated, then it’s time to consider modernizing by ensuring your technology is capable of running the new software.
Furthermore, you need to think about how you expect your company to grow in the future. Is your new tool going to be able to adapt and change as the systems in your business do too? Checking the reviews of potential software is a great way of getting to know whether a product will suit your business. For example, an eCommerce company may look at a TradeGecko review to understand its capabilities.
Don’t create a new beast for your IT teams and employees to battle with, and make sure it synergizes with what you already have in place.
Final Thoughts
Marketing analytics is a huge world. As the data age progresses, being a successful business will depend greatly on how effective your company is at processing and using gathered information.
If you are currently not invested in a marketing analytics tool, now is the time to start looking. The options are many, however, following this guide will give you a better idea of what you need to look for to find an effective tool.
Many companies are invested in data and want to make the most of all of the information available to businesses. Taking the time to consider your business needs, approaching the right strategists, and choosing the right tools will help considerably now, and in the future.
Many events take place which focus on data, analytics and marketing, involving your business in them can bring you to the forefront of new ideas, approaches and solutions.
Check Out The New Martech Cube Podcast. For more such updates follow us on Google News Martech News
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna Bunnell, Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad
Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that provides valuable VoIP phone services for small business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Jenna Bunnell also published articles for domains such as PageFly and Crocoblock. Check out her LinkedIn profile.