Data plays an increasingly central role for decision makers today. Leading a team of marketing professionals that works with clients across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, I have to rely extensively on a range of analytics data to consistently refine marketing campaigns for clients who trust our technology services. As someone who is personally involved in consolidating data, developing dashboards to make sense out of it, and then put it into action through campaigns, this article will help readers to do the same.
A marketing campaign without data-driven insights behind it is like flying blind-folded and then hoping to land safely. Especially with B2B campaigns where down-funnel results are harder to obtain, achieving KPIs and revenue goals requires constant adjustment based on analytics data.
Modern analytics tools offer a goldmine of data and reports. But exactly which B2B analytics questions should you look to answer to optimize your campaigns in run-time is the key to powering forward. The following are areas worth looking at when you are trying to assess what’s working and what needs adjustment for your marketing campaign.
End-to-end touchpoint data for holistic insight
Before you try to make sense of the data, ensure that you even have access to the complete picture. We live in an omni-channel world where customers are constantly hopping from one channel to the other, often in a multi-device way.
For marketers to make any impactful decision that will add to revenue targets, they need to have access to complete data from all online and offline channels. It’s about mapping the customer touchpoint journey on a granular level to understand more about customer behaviour and purchase triggers. This means having insight into where clicks are coming from, which keywords are driving organic progress, emails, content marketing, landing pages, outbound calls, and any other events that are potential opportunities for conversion.
Digital Analytics
In the digital age, web analytics offer deep insight into user behaviour by capturing their digital journey from search to landing page. The following are some core metrics to keep track of if you want to optimise your online campaigns.
Traffic
Perhaps one of the broadest metrics, web traffic to your site indicates how many times webpages have been viewed. This is a good place to start because it reflects how effectively your broader digital or conventional marketing strategy is driving users to your site.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
If you’ve invested in Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, landing pages with calls-to-action, or any other campaign, CTR reflects the percentage of users who actually clicked through, versus those who saw it.
Engagement
While engagement can have different meanings depending on the campaign, generally it includes things like bounce rates, pages per session, time spent on page etc.
Email Campaigns
Email still happens to be one of the strongest generators of ROI. Click-through rates in email campaigns are a measure of how well your subject lines are working, and the individual subscribers’ connection/engagement with your business.
Putting Data into Marketing Context
True value from marketing analytics cannot be derived from merely measuring your core metrics and building up a data pipeline, but contextualizing the insights to business decisions. Translate stats, numbers, and figures to learnings, and ultimately next steps to improve ROI.
The first step to achieving that is to define what each metric implies from a marketing angle. For example, if your conversion rate stands at 7%, it implies that for every 100 clicks on your PPC campaign, 7 ended up becoming paying customers. It also means that 7% of overall web traffic found your service, landing page, and web copy persuasive enough.
Develop a holistic picture of how various campaigns and different strategies have affect lead generation, sales, conversions, and other performance indicators. Insights from your data give you new learnings to improve your existing campaigns, and to enable improved decision-making for future ones.
Summary
The following steps can help analysts, decision makers, and other business professionals to ensure that they have access to the right data that can translate into actionable business insight.
- Understand what your customer's touchpoints are, online and offline. These can include your website, social media platforms, contact center, mobile app, or even face to face interactions as in the case of a franchise network.
- Gather and consolidate all data from all customer touchpoints to gain a business-wide understanding of customer engagement and operational efficiency
- Generate insights from data from each channel. For eg. treat web analytics separately to contact center intelligence. How do customers engage with your brand online, and what type of questions are they asking on the phone, make an effort to segment these.
- Once the trends from each customer-facing channel have been extracted, analyse how they relate to your broader marketing strategy and goals. Find answers to what has been done correctly, and what needs to be optimized further.
The next post will follow up with deeper insights into content marketing strategy and how to use digital intelligence tools to help you market your content properly.
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