Did you know that your business can benefit from mining?
Yes, even if you’re a cloud kitchen business, an online apparel seller, or a B2B business, you could still benefit from mining.
Strange? Not really, when you know we’re talking about data mining. Marketing experts call the yottabytes (quadrillion gigabytes, or a million-trillion megabytes) of data available the “new oil.”
But like crude oil, raw and unprocessed data is also useless. It requires analyzing the data, which humans and AI do together, to figure out patterns and draw meaningful and actionable conclusions.
By analyzing the right type of data in the right manner, businesses can hone their marketing strategies, realize what motivates their target segment’s behavior, and maximize their return on investment.
We’ll discuss five practical ways in which marketers can leverage data analytics to improve marketing ROI. You can go through the list and use data analytics in your favor.
What is marketing analytics or data analytics in marketing
Data analytics is the process of discovering, interpreting, and using meaningful patterns in data. When the data that’s being analyzed is marketing data for improving marketing strategies (usually), the process is known as “marketing data analytics.”
When marketing strategies are created or changed after analyzing data, it’s known as “data-driven marketing.”
Five practical ways to improve your marketing ROI using data analytics
Here we have identified the top 5 ways to utilize data analytics to drive the best ROI possible:
1. Select the right marketing analytics platform
The first thing you need to do is choose the right data analytics platform.
By the right data analytics platform, we mean the one that offers you all the insights you need. For instance, an ideal marketing data analytics platform should offer you data such as cost per lead or cost per click, click-through rate, average order value, and everything important for your marketing ROI.
Pro tip: Ensure that the marketing analytics platform displays the data in a visually immersive or interactive (tools like Tableau and Power BI can help) form. This will help you understand the insights better and thus make better decisions.
2. Identify your goals and create a plan
Right from the beginning, you should know what KPIs you want to measure, what they’re right now, and where you want them to go. This simply means you need to set a goal.
Once you have a clear goal in mind, make a plan for it. For instance, if you find your email click-through rate low, draw up an action plan for how you’ll improve it. Let’s say by improving the CTA or shortening the content.
Doing the above will help you make the most of your data and increase the efficiency of the entire process.
3. Collect and measure the metrics that matter
Social media likes and shares are good to look at. However, they don’t determine your marketing ROI. Therefore, instead of collecting and measuring vanity metrics, you should opt for metrics that somehow impact your marketing strategy or MROI.
Some important metrics that you might want to measure are:
- Email click-through-rate
- Cost per lead
- Cost of acquisition
- Average order value
- Customer lifetime value
- Rate of conversion
4. Don’t forget to experiment
Once you create a strategy based on the insights you get from the data analytics tool, make sure to keep experimenting. After all, only that will tell whether you achieved your goals or not.
For instance, if, according to data analytics, your acquisition costs are high, you can focus on generating quality leads to lower the CAQs. Once you’re done, you can test your strategy again and compare it.
Also, if you targeted a particular market segment in your initial test, consider another segment in a different test and compare the results. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t.
In a nutshell, by experimenting, you can learn:
- What works and what doesn’t
- Whether the changes you made in your marketing strategy using data analytics helped improve the MROI
Pro tip: Try to focus on one metric at a time. Because including more than one metric would make it hard for you to determine which metric impacted the results.
5. Understand your customers better
Using the results of data analytics, try to create buyer personas. Observe how customers interact with different content pieces and determine their true intent. Doing this will help you deeply understand your customers and create personalized marketing strategies.
When you keep buyer persona and buyer intent in mind, you’re more likely to attract high-quality prospects. This will save your marketing team from wasting time on low-quality leads who aren’t that likely to convert.
High-quality prospects are easy to nurture. And when you don’t have to put many resources into nurturing or moving your prospects across the sales funnel, your customer acquisition costs will drop, and your marketing ROI will soar.
Wrapping Up
Data analytics is pretty useful regardless of the domain you’re operating in. However, you can only make the most of it if you do it right. Not setting achievable goals, not planning, considering the wrong metrics, and not experimenting enough can negatively impact your marketing ROI.
So, follow the above steps closely and you will experience an increase in marketing ROI.
