How digital analytics in marketing helps refine strategies

Digital analytics is the biggest game-changing opportunity for marketing since the internet went mainstream almost 25 years ago. The data big bang has unleashed terabytes of information about everything from customer behaviour to weather patterns to demographic shifts in emerging markets. This goldmine of data represents a pivot-point moment for marketing leaders when analysing the customers’ journey and strategies to efficiently penetrate the market.

At the beginning of your digital marketing journey, your main focus lies in the creation of content, pitching well-crafted articles to other blogs or trying out new methods on different social media networks.

But what happens after you have published and distributed your content? This is the part where digital analytics in marketing becomes important because simply writing a blog article or social media post is not enough. Your organisation now requires information about the returns or the reason behind your digital marketing efforts.

These questions are sometimes really hard to answer without having the right tools in hand. For this reason, more and more digital marketers are taking an analytical approach to their marketing efforts. I would even go so far as to say that every digital marketer is, to a certain extent, a digital analyst.

With the evolution of cloud technology and near-infinite computing power connected through real-time networks, data collection has become more attainable for marketers and businesses. The amount of data available now is unprecedented, but what is it for? How is it useful?

Read on to see how digital analytics in marketing is changing the approaches adopted in our increasingly data-driven world!

Predictive digital analytics in marketing helps with retention

With predictive analytics, it is possible to map past data and predict future shopping trends. Whether you are in B2B or B2C marketing, you can anticipate what customers will buy before a purchase is made. In other words, you can easily identify high-value customers before they have even purchased from you. How can predictive analytics perform so many functions? By using a combination of response modelling, affinity analytics, churn analysis and historical data.

You can then develop more precise marketing campaigns that connect more closely with customers. It is also possible to eliminate inefficient processes and reduce churn. Reducing churn ensures that customers don’t drift away. You can gain better understanding of which customers are in danger of leaving and develop marketing campaigns that prevent them from doing so. It also becomes possible to automate market processes to find shortcuts, cut costs and save time.

Targeted advertising fortified by analytics

Marketers are collecting the data produced from a variety of live customer touch-points to paint a complete picture of each customer’s behaviour. Analysing this large amount of data in motion enables marketers to fine-tune customer segmentation models and apply the insights to refine customer engagement strategies that improve the value of customer interactions.

As the number of customer channels increase, marketers need to ensure that they are delivering a tailored experience across all channels. All of these efforts help provide a highly personalised experience while maximising the return on marketing investment. In the long-run, marketers can feed these new, real-time insights back into the organisation to influence product development and product pricing as well.

Digital analytics in marketing is key

More than 63% of marketers reported an increase in spending on data-driven marketing, and around 20% of all marketing spend goes on digital analytics-driven marketing campaigns. Moreover, companies who adopt analytics in their marketing are more likely to have an advantage over the competition and increase profitability. In fact, they are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year.

Data-driven marketing not only benefits clients, but your company as well. One of the reasons for this is that a data-driven marketing strategy has a positive effect on your overall business efforts. Quantitative results are essential for every business because they help you learn more about the current status of your efforts and strategies in place, which, of course, helps you to decide the best road you should take.

The insights gleaned from analytics is golden nectar for effective global marketing strategies, giving businesses a much needed competitive edge in our current climate.

Visit our website for more information on digital analytics in marketing and its impact on the marketing industry.

Improving the e-commerce buying process with digital analytics

Is there anything data analytics cannot do?

This question occurred to me when I was having lunch with an old friend of mine. He was a high ranking executive at a large company behind some of the biggest consumer brands in the country. He was a very busy man (as was I), so whenever there was a chance to catch up, it was an opportunity that could not be missed.

After we talked about our families, politics and cricket, the discussion inevitably turned to our businesses. He told me about some of the challenges he was facing with one of the brands his company-owned.

“We are looking to expand our e-commerce branch,” he explained to me. “But right now, we are simply not where we want to be. It’s hard to find a path forward because we don’t have enough information on our current processes,” “You don’t have any data?” I asked. “No, we do, but what we need is something that can take that data and convert it into useful information that can inform our strategies,”

In other words, he needed digital analytics.

What is digital analytics, exactly?

Digital analytics is the all-encompassing term for different analytics instruments, like web analytics, social analytics and business intelligence. Analytics will collect data from different endpoints and convert them into insights that businesses can use as feedback when making decisions. With these insights, it’s much easier to complete business objectives, like optimising the buying process.

With more and more businesses going online, marketing has become more data-driven with consumer engagement, demand and brand interest becoming data-driven operations.

Analytics tools have been used to analyse qualitative and quantitive data to provide an organisation insight into how customers are responding to their marketing strategies. The information can then be used to refine the messaging and improve the overall experience.

The different categories of analytics can collect, track and analyse data from the different funnels in digital marketing. Analytics is immeasurably useful for organisations because collecting and analysing data across different data points can be time-consuming.

Digital analytics can help organisations measure the different datapoints of their marketing funnel to reveal a lot of useful information. Whether it is by measuring the number of visitors, product demand or frequently visited pages, there are plenty of variables to consider.

How can analytics optimise the buying process?

If you worked in digital marketing, you might have a passing familiarity with certain terms, like bounce rate and page views. If you don’t, that’s fine, just know that there are several KPIs to measure how customers interact with a brand online. Digital analytics takes all these KPIs and analyses them to reveal what gains have been made with current strategies.

With this insight, digital analytics helps organisations optimise the buying process to determine how consumers are interacting with their e-commerce sector. It allows marketers to make sense of the big picture.

Digital analytics allows organisations to better understand the current scenario and also predict how customers will respond in the future. Data-driven predictions can be used to anticipate future trends – this feature allows organisations to find answers to key objectives, like improving loyalty and engagement.

It’s easy for organisations to get caught up in the details and miss the larger trends. While details are very important, digital analytics helps string all the details together to answer the bigger questions on their marketing strategy.

Without analytics, organisations will have a hard time optimising their buying process because it would be difficult to understand how customers interact with the website or even on social media channels. When there is no proper insight, it would be difficult to devise new strategies to improve the buying process.

By using digital analytics, organisations can see what’s hurting the customer experience, what’s aiding it and make data-backed decisions that will optimise the buying process.

Digital analytics is an incredibly useful tool, one that every business should consider investing in. With data analytics, organisations will have an easier time creating smarter strategies that are sure to optimise the buyer’s journey to make the experience as smooth as possible. SAS offers several digital analytics products, like SAS Customer Intelligence and SAS Digital Marketing Analytics, to help organisations optimise the buying process and refine their marketing campaigns.