Marketing Analytics
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Marketing analytics skills refer to the ability of an individual to measure, manage, and analyze the marketing performance of a firm in an effort to maximize the effectiveness of its marketing programs and optimize the returns on investment.
The success of all marketing initiatives is evaluated and performance is measured by managing and studying significant business metrics. The aim of using marketing analytics skills is to determine the current as well as future attractiveness of a particular market, and understand how the company can capitalize on the available opportunities using its strengths.
Why is marketing analytics important
As a marketer you are usually busy with launching new campaigns, creating awareness of your brands, driving leads and nurturing them, and a bunch of such activities. As long as your sales team keeps generating qualified leads, you feel confident that everything is going on the right track. However, that is exactly where you are wrong.
You take marketing initiatives guided by your gut feeling regarding whether or not it is the right thing to do, and you could be right. Nonetheless, you need to monitor and measure the performance of your campaigns to prove it.
You will never be able to get the support of your executive team or raise any finances by merely showing your optimism or the use of trending marketing techniques unless you have numbers to back them up. Even numbers alone are not as effective as is the use of marketing analytics skills to interpret them, making them so important to employers nowadays.
How to improve marketing analytics skills
In order to improve your marketing analytics skills, you need to do the following:
- Analyze the past. Use your marketing analytics skills to report on the past and gain valuable insights. By analyzing the past data you can figure out the mistakes you have been making in the past so that you can avoid them in the future. You will also be able to compare the performance of various campaigns with one another in order to decide which one generated better results and is worth the investment in future as well.
- Identify the most appropriate sources for collecting present data. Before you set off on the mission of improving your marketing analysis skills, you must check whether or not you are lagging behind in the area where most marketers are; data collection. There is quite a chance that all you need to do for improvement is to make sure you collect data from all available sources. For instance, if you are already taking into account the data from online and point of sale transactions, you may want to start collecting even the unstructured information from call-center logs and social media platforms.
- Take actions according to whatever you learn. Your analysis and evaluation of marketing programs is useless for the company unless you do something with that insight. Knowing is not enough, you must act on it as well. For instance, you may want to plan and prepare the company for how you will capitalize on the opportunity that you just identified or cut back investments for the campaign that have never performed well and still aren’t expected to pay off.
