How do profitable businesses employ marketing analytics for a better return on investment?

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing, and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment. 

Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends.

Marketing analytics uses various metrics to measure the performance of marketing initiatives and gathers data from all sources and channels and combines it into a single view. Teams then use the analytics to determine how their marketing initiatives are performing and to identify opportunities for improvement. It is difficult to determine the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns without marketing analytics.

Data is gathered from a broad array of marketing sources including social media, blogging, advertising, inbound campaigns, and more. This allows organizations to understand in real-time the effectiveness of each dollar spent on marketing, as well as how successfully this spending is driving engagement and sales.

Marketers cannot rely on intuition alone to get their campaigns right, especially given the necessity of marketing for retaining customers and driving revenue. 

The data alone doesn’t tell enough of a story to anyone, you must have around people that can tell you the story of your company value and how your work relates to revenue.

A professional analyst can help you:

• See the big picture of marketing trends;
• Understand the ROI of each program;
• Forecast results;
• Identify which programs work and why;
• Monitor trends for a given period and over time.

One of the most valuable benefits of marketing analytics is the way in which it allows organizations to make better decisions. If your marketing efforts remain stagnant, your company cannot grow because you are not engaging modern customers.

Marketing analytics provides a solution for measuring initiatives consistently, which results in having a more effective means of comparison. Utilizing analytics empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions, so teams become more efficient and organizations save money and time.

These days, if you aren’t using online marketing tools, you are missing out on increasing your visibility, growing your business, connecting with customers, and establishing yourself in your niche. You also aren’t gaining that all-important competitive edge, which means you run the risk of becoming irrelevant. But, many companies aren’t sure where to start with online marketing because there are so many facets and an overwhelming number of services, tools, and options. Here are some marketing analytics tools that you may want to try out:

1. Crazy Egg

2. Improvely

3. Inspectlet

4. Megalytic

5. Optimizely

6. SEMrush

7. Sumo

8. Followerwonk etc.

Metrics play a critical role in marketing analytics as the key performance indicators used to monitor a business. From data gathering to analysis to reporting, data analysis for marketing purposes or marketing analytics is providing the actionable insight businesses need to be the leader of their market.