3 Tips to Getting Started with Marketing Analytics

These days, you can’t afford to market your business in the dark. If you’re not connecting with the right audiences and driving growth through your marketing efforts, you’re throwing money away.

That’s why even small businesses are finding that it’s increasingly important to take stock of your outreach through marketing analytics. In fact, with precious little time or resources to spare on pie-in-the-sky ideas and failed experiments, small businesses may find that detailed performance metrics for marketing have become more valuable than ever.

But even if you know you need analytics, how do you get started? Below are the first three questions any business should answer in order to develop a successful marketing analytics strategy.

1) Who’s in the drivers’ seats?

That’s right: seats. To get started properly, you’re going to need two special types of insight. First, you’ll want to involve someone inside your organization – someone who understands the particular needs and direction of your business. This individual is an expert in your company, and they’re going to keep your marketing efforts based on the day-to-day realities of what you do, how you do it, and where you’re headed.

Second, you’ll want an outside analyst who can provide an objective viewpoint as well as a highly informed perspective on the best marketing practices in your industry. Together, these two figures will deliver a balanced approach to your marketing challenges. Think of your marketing analytics strategy as a tandem bike, not a car. It’s going to require two drivers peddling harmoniously.

2) Where are you going?

Now that you’ve named your decision makers, these two individuals will have the task of identifying the questions that will best drive growth for the company. That means specific questions about your marketing that you can actually answer through analytics. These questions might include:

●     How much of an increase in revenue did our newly converted leads contribute?

●     How can we measure changes in the visibility of our brand?

●     Which marketing efforts contributed to the nurture of a given lead?

These questions will guide your entire path forward, helping nail down explicit goals for your analytics efforts. Getting this step right helps you choose the right tools for the job now, and helps you avoid getting mired in confused or unproductive questions later.

Remember: analytics can provide extraordinarily detailed and powerful answers, but you have to make sure you’re asking the right questions.

3) What do you need to get there?

Finally, your decision-making duo is going to have to take a long, hard look at what you’ll need to get where you’re going. For most marketing analytics efforts, there are a common set of tools and prerequisites required to answer the questions identified in Step 2.

These prerequisites include a comprehensive strategy for all of your data, and a two core signs of seriousness in your efforts: investment in and ongoing commitment to your analytics efforts.

As with any questions worth answering, marketing analytics isn’t a pit stop or convenience store for insight. By continuously tracking your efforts over time, you’ll achieve a richer and more actionable picture of where you are and where you’re going. What’s working, and what isn’t. And with the proper preparation – the right balance of insiders and outsiders, asking the right questions – you’ll be on track for success.