Fundamentals of Analytics
Marketing leaders must work harder than ever to maintain an edge over the competition. Analytics is a vital tool that informs businesses on the how and why of their marketing performance. If you follow the fundamentals of analytics, you can turn data into actionable insights.
Know Customer Trends and Preference
Analytics are ideal for providing data-driven insights into consumer groups and their behaviors. If a brand wants to produce content that resonates with a target audience, it needs to use analytics.
By using analytics, a business can answer questions like:
- What products are in high demand?
- Which ads generate conversions?
- What messaging best attracts new leads?
- What search terms are people using to find competitor’s sites?
When a business understands the preferences of its target audience and can predict trends – it can adapt its marketing strategy to be more relevant and, thus, more effective.
Understand Product Development Trends
Understand What You Want to Measure
There are different metrics a business can use to measure the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns. First, a company needs to be aware of the problem it’s trying to solve or the insight it wants to gain. Knowing this will help it determine which metric to analyze and gather data about.
The key is to measure smartly. You should ensure any metrics are goal-oriented. There needs to be a purpose behind marketing activities, which should then inform the right metric to use to see how well the actions are performing (note that some take time to become measurable).
Establish a Benchmark
Every business will have different measurables and define its success uniquely. You must establish appropriate benchmarks to meet goals (within a defined budget) and determine if they’re being met. This will affect the type of data and metrics you monitor.
Not every benchmark will be the right for a given situation. The business will need to decide the overall objective it’s trying to achieve and then select a benchmark that will accurately measure campaign effectiveness.
Assess Your Current Capabilities
It is imperative that a business have a firm understanding of its weak points. By knowing what its weak points are, a business can then proceed to strengthen these oversights.
For example, let’s say a brand discovers that its highest customer engagement and lead generation comes from social media posts. However, it finds that it is inconsistent in its posting schedule to the social media platform. The business could then infer it needs to create a content calendar for social media.
Deploy a Marketing Analytics Tool
Analytics tools should give you a holistic view of the performance of specific campaigns in real time. Without data from an analytics tool, you won’t know what is performing well, what problems you have, and what areas need your focus in the future.
There are numerous analytics tools available. Nearly all gather and report on data from a brand’s channels.
A few examples of marketing analytics tools include:
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads Manager
- Facebook Ads Manager
- Optimizely
- SEMrush
- AHREFS
- TubeBuddy
- Data Studio
Some tools are free, such as Google Analytics, whereas many others require a monthly subscription. Also important to note is that each tool also often has a specialization. For example, Google Analytics is best for following website performance. BuzzSumo is best at analyzing social media and trending topics on major social media platforms.
Always Start With the Fundamentals of Analytics
Analytics fundamentals are the foundation and starting point for any content marketing strategy. They give you an idea of where and how to start gathering and measuring data. If a business wants to be able to make informed decisions on their content marketing, then analytics is an essential factor.
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