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John Wannamaker famously claimed that he wasted 50% of his advertising budget, but didn’t know which 50% was wasted. Well, that may be true of traditional advertising, with few metrics to monitor performance, but it certainly doesn’t apply to digital marketing. Armed with better metrics to monitor your performance, you can maximize your return on investment (ROI) by focusing on the tactics that will produce the highest return on investment.

What is Marketing Analysis?

Market research involves collecting extensive data and examining various marketing strategies to assess the strengths and weaknesses of marketing initiatives. Of course, you maximize ROI by focusing on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and using them to determine which tactics to pursue and which to discard. By gaining insights from your data, you are also maximizing ROI by combining the best bits of your tactics.

For example, knowing that certain key phrases in email subject lines will help you create new subject lines that use those phrases in unique and creative ways.

Here are some of the best ways to use marketing analytics to maximize ROI for your business:

1. Take a look at the bigger picture of marketing campaigns

Marketing analytics include digital marketing analytics such as SEO analytics and behavioral analytics, or how customers interact with your company. For the most part, marketers make decisions based on the data they get from their website, social media, or other individual platforms. However, with this strategy, companies could miss the true picture of market performance.

It is important to go beyond single channel analysis and consider the entirety and collective relationship of your online and offline marketing campaigns. This is where marketing analysis comes in. In marketing analysis, business owners and marketers consider all marketing efforts across all channels in order to make informed business decisions.

2. Create buyer personas based on the results of the marketing analysis

With the help of customer relationship management (CRM) data, you can determine the behavior of your target group and existing customers. By understanding customers and prospects at a deeper level, you can develop better marketing strategies, including tailoring messaging to the specific needs and “hot buttons” of your target market.

Check out this blank persona template for ideas on how to create personas for your brand.

Image courtesy of Buffer

Here’s how you can create buyer personas to maximize ROI with CRM:

• Analyze CRM data to know your customers: A CRM software program helps strengthen your customer relationship by knowing what makes them happy and unhappy. For example, CRM can show you the favorite products your customers buy or their favorite websites that you want to visit on your website.
• Profiling and segmentation: Knowing your customers well makes it easier for you to create buyer personas for your ideal customers. This strategy involves profiling and segmenting your customers with the help of the best CRM software. By segmenting your market, you can develop specific campaigns to reach each segment. We call this positioning.
• Customize your sales and marketing: Once you know what your customers prefer, you can adjust your sales and marketing process, capture all touchpoints and attract potential customers.

3. Create better content marketing tactics

Are you running a blog on your ecommerce website? If not, you should consider adding one as content marketing is an effective strategy for bringing unpaid or organic traffic to your website. If so, you can use marketing analytics to create better blog content by analyzing the performance of your content to see which content is performing best.

Knowing your audience is one of the most important considerations when creating a content strategy. If you know what visitors to your web pages like to read, you can improve these pages or create similar articles to attract more people to your site. For example, if an above-average number of visitors access pages on a certain topic or offer a similar style, creating more pages with this in mind should attract more visitors.

A more nuanced way to use analytics to maximize ROI is to segment your pages and performance based on customer groups. For example, if younger adults convert at higher conversion rates, you will create more content that will attract that younger audience.

Here are the relevant marketing metrics related to developing better content marketing strategies to maximize your ROI:

• Web traffic sources: This marketing metric will help you understand where the traffic is coming from. That way, you can focus on creating content on those websites or, conversely, work on building traffic from another source that offers opportunities to maximize ROI.
• Measured value for the first visit: This metric will help you understand how online users find your website and how engaging they are on their first visit.
• Brand awareness metric: This metric tracks how people know your business or branding in search engines through your website content or social media posts.
• Total visits: This marketing metric measures the number of people who have visited your webpage or website.
• Return visitor metric: This metric shows the effectiveness of your website when it comes to building an audience that is directly influenced by your web content.
• Time on site: evaluates the time visitors spend on your website during a visit. The longer they spend reading your content, the better for SEO and the more likely they are to convert.
• Bounce rate: Ratings visitors who left the page after viewing a single page. The bounce rate effectively means “I came, I hated, I went”. Not only does a high bounce rate hurt SEO, but it also lowers your overall conversion rate as people can make a purchase if they leave the page after viewing a single page.

4. Accurately measure relevant business metrics

Marketing analytics tools help you measure the most relevant marketing metrics for your business. Every company has a unique niche, target audience and goals. As a result, not all companies can rely on a single set of metrics to maximize ROI. By analyzing marketing metrics relevant to your brand, you will create better business marketing strategies to increase your sales.

Marketers should use marketing analytics to review all marketing prospects and metrics that are appropriate for the type of business they are supporting. Marketing metrics are broadly categorized into digital marketing metrics, email marketing metrics, social media metrics, and offline marketing metrics.

Here are some examples of marketing metrics:

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): LTV measures the gross profit generated by customers for the entire time they remain customers of your company.
• Funnel Conversion Rate: measures the speed at which your prospects move through the sales marketing funnel. A high conversion rate leads to a higher ROI.
• Marketing customers: This metric measures the total number of customers that came from your marketing efforts.
• Lead conversion rate: measures the number of leads converted into sales.

5. Use Marketing Analytics to Become More Competitive

Data fuels the future of marketing through the use of marketing analytics. If you don’t want your business to be left behind, process data with the right tools to develop good marketing intelligence. Without a consistent, well-organized market performance assessment plan, like John Wannamaker, you’re in the dark and unaware of which tactics will generate the highest ROI.

By determining the relevant marketing metrics for your business, you know what you are competing for. You improve your branding and your partnerships with your stakeholders. Of course, with marketing analytics, you can do quality analytics, understand marketing technologies, and optimize recommendations for marketing campaigns.

Optimize your marketing campaigns and become more competitive by choosing the right features and benefits of marketing analytics software such as: B. the following:

• Real-time analytics for quick, easy and accurate data collection
• Brand measurement functions to increase brand awareness
• Contextualized market and customer insights to create buyer personas

Conclusion

You just learned about the different ways you can use marketing analytics to maximize ROI. Marketing gives you helpful insights into your audience as well as the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. When you know the relevant data of all of your marketing campaigns, you can make specific plans that will generate the highest ROI. Regularly monitoring your marketing efforts is the key to consistently high profits with the right strategies.

Author: Angela Hausman, PhD

Follow @MarketingLetter

I run Hausman and Associates, a full-service marketing firm that works at the intersection of marketing and digital media. We offer a variety of digital marketing solutions including content marketing, email marketing, SEO / SEM, social media marketing, lead generation, as well as marketing strategy, branding, market research and a variety of … Show complete profile >