Marketing Analytics Facts? Tips, Tools & Why It Matters

Marketing analytics is the practice of using data to evaluate the effectiveness and success of marketing activities. Marketing analytics allows you to gather deeper consumer insights, optimize your marketing objectives, and get a better return on investment.

Marketing analytics benefits both marketers and consumers.
This analysis allows marketers to achieve higher ROI on marketing investments by understanding what is successful in driving either conversions, brand awareness, or both.  Analytics also ensures that consumers see a greater number of targeted, personalized ads that speak to their specific needs and interests, rather than mass communications that tend to annoy.
Marketing data can be analyzed using a variety of methods and models depending on the KPIs being measured. For example, analysis of brand awareness relies upon different data and models than analysis of conversions. Some popular analytics models and methods include:

Media Mix Models (MMM): Attribution models that look at aggregate data over a long period of time.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): Attribution models that provide person-level data from across the buyer’s journey.
Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM): A form of measurement that integrates various attribution models including MMM and MTA into comprehensive engagement metrics.

The Importance of Marketing Analytics
In the modern marketing landscape, accurate data is more important than ever. Consumers have become highly selective in choosing the branded media they engage with and the media they ignore.
If brands want to catch the ideal buyer’s attention, they must rely on accurate data to create targeted personal ads based on individual interests, rather than broader demographic associations. This will allow marketing teams to serve the right ad, at the right time, on the right channel to move consumers down the sales funnel.

How Organizations Use Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics data helps your business make decisions on everything from ad spend to product updates, branding and more. To give yourself a true 360 degree view of your campaigns and be sure you are making the right decisions, it's important to take data from multiple sources (online and offline). Using this data, your team can gain insights into the following:

Product Intelligence
Product intelligence involves taking a deep dive into the brand’s products as well as analyzing how those products stack up within the market. Typically done by speaking to consumers, polling target audiences or engaging them with surveys, organizations can better understand the differentiators and competitive advantages of their products. From there, teams can better align products to the unique consumer interests and problems that help drive conversions.

Customer Trends and Preferences
Analytics can tell a lot about your consumers. What messaging / creative resonates with them? Which products are they buying and which have they researched in the past? Which ads are leading to conversions and which are ignored?
Product Development Trends
Analytics can also offer insight into the types of product features consumers want. Marketing teams can pass this information on to product development for future iterations.  

Customer Support
Analytics also helps uncover areas of the buyer’s journey that could be simplified or improved. Where are your clients struggling? Are there ways you can simplify your product or make the check-out process easier?

Messaging and Media
Data analysis can determine where marketers choose to display messages for particular consumers. This has become especially important due to the sheer number of channels. In addition to traditional marketing channels such as print, television and broadcast, marketers must also know which digital channels and social media networks consumers prefer. Analytics answers these key questions:  
What media should you be buying?
Which are driving the most sales?
What message is resonating with your audience?

Competition
How do your marketing efforts compare with the competition? How can you close that gap if there is one? Are there opportunities your competitors are capitalizing on that you may have missed?

Predict Future Results
If you have a thorough understanding of why a campaign worked, you’ll be able to apply that knowledge to future campaigns for increased ROI.