Intro to Analytics
As digital marketing continues to be one of the most effective marketing methods, determining the best way to measure your success is key.
No matter how in-depth the buyer persona is, marketing efforts will always have room for improvement. Traditional metrics like social shares or page views only provide a partial view. To dig deep and understand the marketing strategy’s effectiveness, you need to know how well the content appeals to the audience, whether leads convert to buyers, and more.
That’s where analytics comes in.
What Are Content Marketing Analytics?
Content marketing analytics is the process and use of tools to evaluate the effectiveness and value of the content. More than that, it also allows you to identify current trends and patterns and enables decisions backed by data.
Why Is Marketing Analytics Important?
In this digital age, consumers have thousands of brands to choose from and are more selective than ever in what media engages them. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd and draw the interest of an audience.
If a brand wants to capture the interest of its target audience and have them become loyal customers, then the business must use analytics. Through analytics, a business can learn how to create the right targeted ad & content at the right time, on the right channels. By doing this, a business improves the odds of the consumer moving down the sales funnel.
What Can You Do With Marketing Analytics?
Analytics can help leaders better understand what goals the business should strive for and how well those activities perform. Ultimately, marketing professionals should be able to leverage analytics to show both qualitative and quantitative results for their efforts.
Here are a few examples of what you can do with analytics:
- Understand the target audience in greater detail
- Identify current trends and predict future trends
- Discover content gaps to exploit
- Measure whether blog posts are driving conversions
- Find out the optimal day and time to publish content
- Uncover SEO opportunities
Ultimately, analytics provides data to business leaders to decide what future course of action to take.
3 Tips to Marketing Analytics Success
Knowing where to start can be challenging with so many tools and metrics. However, there are three broad steps you can take to make sure you focus on the best marketing activities:
Be Balanced in Your Analytic Techniques
You need to take a balanced approach to get the biggest benefit from analytics. That means your analysis should cover the past, present, and future periods.
By analyzing historical data, you can understand what strategies or campaigns met or fell short of benchmarks. This allows you to learn from past mistakes and find ways to iterate.
Analyzing the present also provides valuable real-time data. By keeping an eye on the present, you can remain fluid and quickly adapt to ever-shifting fads & trends.
Finally, analytics can also play a part in future performance. Data-driven predictions allow you to prepare for market shifts and changing trends.
Know Your Capabilities and Fill in the Gaps
Marketing professionals need to stay in tune with where they currently stand with analytic capabilities. Most businesses are working within a budget, and digital strategists may not be able to purchase every tool they desire for analytics. You can discover gaps and devise a strategy to fill them by doing an audit.
Use What You’ve Learned
A mountain of data is meaningless if your company doesn’t choose to act on it. Businesses should use analytics to help them test and learn, improving the overall performance of their marketing strategy.
Analytics Are Essential for Success
Analytics is a valuable means by which a business can measure the performance of strategy. Through analytics, a business can learn how to improve the ROI of its overall marketing efforts.
Using analytics is an indispensable process that will help a business be more efficient and make a bigger impact with its content.