Damn right it would! I am talking about Marketing Analytics which is NOT just web or social analytics and is beyond specific marketing metrics. Most importantly, I am referring to Integrated Marketing Analytics which is usually more people-centric, featuring the prospect, lead or customer as the unit of focus.
This gives you richer insights on the effectiveness of your entire marketing campaigns so that you can make wiser and better business and marketing decisions - know where to play, how to play and when to play.
McKinsey through the application of their Marketing Navigator found that applying analytics effectively can allow companies to free up 15-30 percent of their total marketing budget. McKinsey’s DataMatics study also showed that firms in the top quartile of analytics performance were 20 times better at attracting new customers and more than five times better at retaining existing ones than firms in the bottom quartile.
Analytics can make a huge impact to business development strategies.
When you marry your marketing analytics to your Sales CRM system, you get a very powerful view of your different customer segments’ behaviours. We are agents for HubSpot so we know the impact it can make.
You can track and monitor their every interaction with your company and know which mechanism trigger a sales engagement. You can then tailor your offers and align to sensible marketing and sales channels and processes.
I realise that different stakeholders may have different KPIs. There are tools in the market, like, Hubspot that allow you to customise reports and create visual dashboards, diced from analytics so that you can quickly identify bottlenecks in your lead flow with funnel visualisations, allowing you to optimise your processes in real time. Now your sales department wants to work with you because you can demonstrate real actionable data that relate directly to their business.
Example On How Analytics Help Make Better Decisions:
One home-appliance company, for example, typically spent a large portion of its marketing budget on print, television, and display advertising to get into the consideration set of its target consumers.
Yet analysis of the consumer decision journey showed that most people looking for home appliances browsed retailers’ websites—and fewer than 9 percent visited the manufacturer’s own site. When the company shifted spending away from general advertising to distributor website content, it gained 21% in e-commerce sales. (source: Forbes)
CMOs struggle BIG time when it comes to measuring Marketing ROI
With an integrated view of ALL of your marketing and sales data in one place, you can quickly pinpoint exactly what works and what doesn’t and make insightful decisions on what to do next. You can see the revenue generated from each asset, each tactic throughout the entire customer life-cycle to be able to make informed decisions on where you want to put your money.
Integrated Marketing Analytics play a big part in Inbound Marketing to help you create quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.
This event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget. (source: Gartner Research).
According to a study done by MIT Sloan School of Management, this concept can generate 54% more leads than traditional paid marketing.
- Attracting Site Visitors: Customers reached 2.40 times more visitors per month within 1 year.
- Converting Visitors to Leads: Customers reached 5.99 times more leads per month within 1 year.
- Turning Leads into Customers: 69% of customers saw an increase in sales revenue, 74% of which experienced this increase within 7 months.
Tracking your brand and your Competitor
Based on search engine rankings, web traffic and social media reach, you are able to build keywords, streams of interactions and see what matter to you and compare that with your competitors.
Keywords are important because on average, we conduct 12 billion searches per month on the web in the United States alone. (source: Comscore, July 2014). Sadly, the average click-through rate for paid search in 2010 (worldwide) was only 2% (source: Convario, January 2011).
That means it is critical that your content has the right keywords to attract customers and that you are tracking this against your competitor. How would you know which keyword or stream of interaction except with insights gained from Integrated Marketing Analytics. When it comes to social media, 96% of social media managers measure number of fans and followers, 89% measure traffic, 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice, and 51% track sentiment (source: Awareness, Inc.).
That’s all good, but be careful not to be too caught up with the little things of big data and lose sight of the bigger picture.
1. You can create an agile marketing engine with Integrated Marketing Analytics
There are so many advantages. You have a complete REAL TIME view of your customers, your activities, your content and how each impact leads and sales at every customer’s life-cycle.
You make informed decisions on your investments, resources, campaigns and build relevant offers and content to attract and nurture leads. You can design attribution models to track and provide sensible business related marketing reports. You can manage your posts, emails, marketing channels and your teams from one platform. You can orchestrate how marketing works to your advantage very quickly.
To do this, I suggest you look at Integrated Marketing Analytics platforms which include CRM and Marketing Automation like HubSpot.
2. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales.
Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance (source: MarketingSherpa). Because everything is integrated and orchestrated and you are bringing prospect and customers along their journey with the right content and actions, you can actually replace more than 60% of dated sales functions like cold calling. That means your sales people could focus on talking to high propensity prospects, building deeper customer relationships and providing better customer support.
Analytics will continue to evolve to support what we call Real-Time Marketing. We are already talking about predictive analytics where you are able to anticipate your customer’s next action to drive more targeted engagements. The art of doing sales and the creativity of marketing will depend heavily on the Science of Integrated Marketing Analytics.
The role of Integrated Marketing Analytics is so important in shaping how businesses sell and perform.
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The 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About
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Vermilion Pinstripes Sales Marketing Communications is based in Port Macquarie, Australia and Singapore.
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