How To Conduct A Marketing Analysis

Marketing doesn't have to throw a kitchen sink against a wall to see what sticks. An effective marketing strategy is based on extensive research about your audience and your existing marketing efforts. To better understand your customers, your strategies, and how your marketing spend is being spent, you need to conduct a comprehensive marketing analysis of your business.

What is marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is a process that helps you understand the demographics and different segments of your target audience, effective engagement strategies, and ways to improve your customer journey and conversions. Performing marketing analytics can help you improve your marketing campaigns, increase the ROI of your marketing budget, increase brand awareness and customer loyalty, and generate more leads.

"Marketing analytics determine the success and failure of marketing campaigns," says Raare Solutions CEO Esther Poulsen. "You have to create customer retention programs by anticipating what the results should be and then doing detailed analysis to determine whether the results have been achieved, exceeded or not."

How do you do marketing analytics?

You can use methods like surveys, polls, and focus groups to conduct an in-depth marketing analysis of your business. Link to user comments and online reviews on your social media pages. Use a SWOT analysis to identify your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from both a marketing perspective and an overall operational perspective. Use your social media analytics tools to better understand your audience's social media behavior.

There are many tools you can use to improve your marketing analytics and insights as well. Here's an overview of some of the free or low-cost tools available for businesses.

• Ahrefs Ahrefs is an SEO tool that allows you to analyze existing content and optimize new content before displaying it. SEO is an essential tool to increase your ranking on search engines like Google and Bing and ensure that more users find you when they search for relevant keywords and phrases.
• Crazy egg Crazy Egg is useful for website analytics and can help you determine which users are coming to your site and from where. This shows you which members of your target audience are experiencing your outbound marketing efforts and are interested enough to view or click through to your website.
• Google Analytics. Few tools for understanding the origin and behavior of web traffic are as popular as Google Analytics. It can show you how users find your site and what they do after they visit. This high-level insight can help you understand why users are leaving your site, increase the time they spend on your pages, and optimize how you want them to interact. Best of all, Google Analytics is free.
• Semrush: Semrush is an SEO tool that will help you optimize your online content and check your competitive edge. It offers a variety of pricing packages for businesses of all sizes and can be customized as your business grows and continually evaluates your marketing needs.
• Spyfu. SpyFu is great for tracking your competitors' performance in online advertising and search engine rankings and helping you set goals to beat them. Your marketing efforts don't happen in a vacuum. Understanding what your competitors are doing can help you beat them or do something unique to eliminate confusion.

What is marketing analytics?

For marketing analysis to be truly comprehensive, it must examine all relevant aspects of your marketing efforts. At a minimum, you should include the following elements in your company's marketing analysis:

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leaders and prospects

Especially important for marketing campaigns aimed at generating new business, lead and lead analysis helps you understand where to find new customers and how to attract them to your brand. Marketing analytics can determine the best ways to nurture these customers and guide them through the conversion funnel to a purchase decision.

conversions

A conversion refers to any decision you want to influence, whether it's opening an email, clicking an ad, or interacting with your social media accounts. While the most common proposition is to convert a lead or prospect into a paying customer, a sale is not the only type of conversion a marketing campaign aims to achieve. Review your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine which conversions are most important to you in a given campaign.

the public

Marketing analytics should provide information about your audience's needs, including how your products or services do or do not meet those needs. The more demographic information you gather about your audience, the better you can segment your audience and target the type of content that can convert each segment.

"The more a brand knows about people who are and aren't interested in a product or service, the more likely they are to convert," Poulsen said. “It also ensures that the company invests in the right customers. After all, it allows the seller to talk to the consumer on his terms and in the way he wants. »

marriage

Once you understand your audience, you can tailor your brand messages and various marketing campaigns to capture their attention. Marketing analytics look at your audience's engagement with your brand using metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate of your email campaign.

Your analytics should also consider user behavior after viewing your content. For example, if a user clicks on a paid ad that takes them to your landing page, what will the user do? Once you understand the reasons for these metrics, you can improve them by optimizing your marketing campaigns to reach wider segments of your audience and generate more attention.

Industry overview and competitive landscape

In order to adapt your strategy to the market, it is important to gain insight into your industry through competitive marketing analysis. Not only do you need to understand market growth and other industry trends, but you also need to understand how you manage your competitors. Competitive marketing analysis will help you understand how well your business is facing direct or indirect competition. "A basic overview of the industry includes size, trends and projected growth," says Anthony Mine, digital marketing specialist at Qualified Online Traffic. “It focuses more on your business or your customers than the industry as a whole. Is the industry growing, more/less demand, more/less competitors, new technology/products/services, etc.? ? »

When conducting your marketing analysis, take the time to collect sufficient data for each of these elements. Detailed marketing analysis often produces skewed results, or worse, not enough data to draw meaningful conclusions.

"The most common mistake is not taking enough time to carefully collect and analyze data and results," says Kelly J. Waffle. "Many forget to set aside enough time, and as a result, limit the results. Early process restrictions affect all future strategies and decisions."

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How to write a marketing analysis

Writing a marketing analysis is an important part of summarizing the collected data in an accessible format. How you write your marketing analysis will determine how useful the results are in improving your marketing strategies. Ideally, your marketing analysis should include a clear description of the data you analyzed, the results of your analysis, and how you can positively impact your KPIs in the future.

"The marketing plan should have a preliminary report," Poulsen said. "In formal terms, the organization defines the target audience, timings, number of marketing campaigns (email, direct mail, digital) and investments to be made in the program."

In addition, marketing analytics should include specific key performance indicators to measure the success or failure of certain strategies. For example, if you're running an email marketing campaign to increase engagement, your KPIs might be open rate, click rate, and bounce rate. Similarly, if you're reviewing a content marketing campaign, your KPIs might include Google's first page rank, user time on page, and click-through rate built into calls to action.

Set baseline goals for each KPI and track them across your different marketing campaigns. Marketing analytics show the effectiveness of these campaigns in achieving your goals. Remember that not all goals need to be directly related to sales; sometimes, brand awareness and engagement is the achievement that brings a potential customer one step closer to becoming a customer.

"This will help determine whether or not the campaign was successful," Poulsen said. "Marketing analytics should not only report results, but also why it worked or didn't work."

What is the importance of marketing analysis in a business plan?

The biggest benefit of marketing analytics is that it shows you how you can use your marketing budget in the most targeted and effective way. You'll better understand where your audience is active and which messages resonate with them. When you gain this insight through a comprehensive analysis of your audience, as well as the gaps in your current marketing efforts, you'll understand how to increase your marketing ROI.

"They say a lot of marketing is wasted because you don't understand how it works and why," Poulsen said. "The more analytics and insights you get, the better your chances of funding your future marketing approach and the ROI."

A small business marketing plan will help you connect with your customers and get them to buy your products or services.

What information can marketing analytics provide?

Marketing analytics are designed to help you optimize your future marketing efforts by understanding what is working and what isn't in your current marketing campaigns. It can provide your business with the following information:

Understanding ROI

All aspects of marketing analytics are related to ROI. How many sales are you making for every dollar spent on marketing? While not all marketing activities are directly related to sales, they should all be related to bringing new customers into the conversion funnel and engaging existing customers in the purchase decision.

"Determining the ROI of a campaign is very important," said Poulsen. “The most important ROI of a business is conversions. It is determined by the people who campaigned through the list, received the message through any channel (direct mail, email, social media, digital, media) or responded, and determines whether the strategy led to a conversion or an expected result. be it leads, sales or other measures”.

Understand your audience

Knowledge of your audience—the channels they're most active on, their likes and dislikes, and their pain points—should guide your marketing efforts. Marketing analytics can help you better understand your audience and the demographics of its different segments, so you can target customers in the right channels with better brand messages.

"That being said, you want to describe who your ideal customer is," Money said. “What is its demographic? What are their interests, desires, hopes, needs [and] dreams? Where are they (geographically and online groups, websites, etc.)? So we can target them.

Discover new markets

Your marketing analysis should also uncover potential members of your target audience that you may not have thought about before. These may be those who need the products or services you already offer, or those who need a use case for products and services that you haven't thought about in your marketing. This can allow you to scale and sell your products or services. In addition to identifying new markets, marketing analysis should determine market growth potential.

Discover SEO options

As part of your marketing analysis, review your website and its content to identify areas you can optimize for search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of ensuring that the content on your website and social media platforms encourages search engines to crawl your pages and rank higher in search results. Ideally, your website will appear on the first page of Google results when your audience searches for keywords and phrases related to your brand, products and services.

Explore paid advertising options

Marketing analytics should include an overview of paid advertising campaigns, such as pay-per-click advertising. In addition to finding new ways to increase your reach with paid advertising, you should also focus on what you're doing and how effective it is. This can reveal ways to optimize your advertising spend by tailoring ads to your audience's interests and increasing engagement and conversions.

"Marketing analytics should relate to the overall strategic behavior of your organization," Waffle said. "Furthermore, in emerging markets it is necessary to carry out a marketing analysis once a year. If you're in a mature market, you'll want to conduct market research every two to three years.

Depending on the state of your business, you can immediately do a marketing analysis, especially if you plan to expand your offer.

"When you launch new products or services, you need to think carefully about marketing analytics," Waffle said. "If you're trying to reach a new market or a new audience, you need a new marketing analysis."

If you've never done a marketing analysis, now is the time to do it. A comprehensive and in-depth marketing analysis will help you allocate your marketing spend to better engage your audience and increase conversions. Whether you're launching a new marketing campaign, launching a new product, testing new features, or trying to optimize your marketing efforts, marketing analytics are essential if you want to improve your ROI.

Mike Berner contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for an earlier version of this article.

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