Want to meet your customer? Let marketing analytics make the introductions.
In business, data might as well be money. If you’re leading a company, you know what we’re talking about. Every quarter, when those financial reports come out, they tell a story – one that your board, your shareholders, and your employees care deeply about. They also chart a path forward: is it time to expand or contract? Focus on different initiatives, or keep moving forward as you have been?
Data from marketing analytics is no different. Though it measures your marketing performance rather than your financial performance, it still provides vital information that can drive growth, investment, profits, and sustainability.
Think of marketing analytics as a window into your customer’s mind – and pocketbook. By understanding customer behavior with metrics like cost of customer acquisition, click-through rates, time on page, for example, you can significantly improve ROI and eliminate wasted time and money.
Thanks to smartphones and the internet, most customer behavior can be tracked, measured, and analyzed. As a result, it’s easy to gauge who has seen your ad, went to the landing page after getting an email, or abandoned their cart without converting. Everything your customer does shows up in the data. That data is your customer talking.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand it.
As a business leader, you already understand how to deal with data – and marketing data is no different. To make the most of it, of course, you’ll want to have a baseline understanding of your marketing efforts, including your campaign goals and channels. But the key is to use your critical thinking skills to question the story that the data seems to be telling you. When a number seems out of line with the norm or historical pattern, follow the breadcrumbs. The deeper you dig, the more insights will come.
Marketing metrics are meaningless unless they are tied to specific business goals. If your goal is to drive brand awareness, for instance, metrics like impressions and visits to your website are key. If your goal is to gather more prospects, then click-through rates and email sign-ups or product demo requests might be most important. And if your #1 priority is to convert more leads into paying customers, then data on conversion rates and time on page might be more important than overall page views.
Your marketing director will be a key partner in sifting through all the data to pull what’s most important, but your leadership is essential. Discuss overall goals with your MD and then ask them to choose a small set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that are directly tied to those goals, and focus on those. When a number doesn’t make sense, ask for more details.
As you go through this exercise, keep this in mind: data is only important if you’re going to take action because of it. Get in the habit of discussing with your team how you will modify your business strategy and investments, based on what the data show.
Let’s say you run a small travel agency that works with big corporate clients, and your blog has traditionally featured feel-good articles about travel: getting to experience a different culture, say, or how best to maximize business trips with a dash of vacation time at the end of them. When you dig into the data, however, you discover that the blog posts that really get traction are the ones about how to find flights that are within corporate expense limits, or which apps can automatically tally up all your expenses for you. Time to recalibrate your blog content, so you are giving clients the info they value the most – leading to greater customer loyalty and more frequent purchasing.
Since marketing data is the voice of your customer, your entire organization can benefit from it. Your marketing team should communicate their findings to every team that’s impacted (hint: that means everybody in your organization) – including which products are selling well and which aren’t, whether the timing of a launch conflicts with a major industry event, what content is attracting readers, which information sources your customers trust, what the purchase decision timeline is, and more. Your marketing department needs to be connected to every aspect of the business, from product development to post-sales. With robust cross-organizational collaboration, your right hand knows what your left hand is doing—and can help do it better. The data will point the way forward.
As you consume and analyze marketing data, be on guard against substituting your expectations in place of customer behavior. Most marketing campaigns start with a set of assumptions, but if the data (aka, the customer) is telling you something different from what you expected, listen!
Be prepared to be agile. If the data show that a change is needed, try out that change in a pilot project and measure the results. Encourage your marketing team to test different channels and tactics, rather than sticking to the same strategies year after year. Again, with clear agreement on the goals, your team can be empowered to find new and better ways to achieve them, knowing the customer will always “vote with their wallet.”
How often should you, as the business leader, review marketing data? Your marketing director can weigh in on the timing and cadence, but in general, we’ve seen companies have success with monthly and quarterly reporting. Because digital marketing is dynamic, you can get data very quickly. It’s not unusual to track, say, high-priority digital campaigns on a weekly or even daily basis. But that’s for your marketing team, not you. As long as you set clear parameters on how much to invest to test a new campaign, you can feel comfortable allowing your marketing team to watch the daily results and report back to you each month.
There’s a perception that marketing data isn’t as concrete as financial data, leading some business leaders to ignore it as fluff or simply a cost center. But once you realize that marketing data is really the measure of your customer’s (and future customer’s) behavior, you’ll see these metrics are actually a treasure trove of essential information for improving your bottom line.
***
It was during my career in the NFL that the first wave of analytics really started taking off. We were looking at what plays were most effective in all kinds of situations: starting from the left hash, from the right hash, from our side of the field, close to the goal line, and everywhere in between. We studied data against different defenses, different downs and distances, and different game situations. I was fascinated by how it made our team smarter!
In the years since then, of course, data and analytics have exploded. There is so much available for people to discover, and modern game broadcasts make it more accessible than ever. But data isn’t just for sports. It’s so important to our businesses!
This article makes a great case for how to think about analytics in a way that makes sense and is more impactful than just a massive set of numbers. Look for the signs – the signs are reality!
Fran Tarkenton
