If you've been involved in marketing in the past ten years or so, you will no doubt be familiar with the phrase, 'data analytics.' It can be a bit of an enigma when you find yourself involved with this area of marketing, and you can easily find yourself wondering, "Where do I start?" I know that's where I found myself when I ran my first email campaign more than ten years ago. In a nutshell, analytics tells us marketers if what we are doing is working for our business.
As marketers, our goal is ultimately to bring awareness about our company or organization to an audience. That audience is defined by our company's mission and/or customer base. So, what exactly is the meaning of 'data analytics'? According to Investopedia, data analytics is "the science of analyzing raw data in order to make conclusions about that information." Simple, right? While this topic could be covered in multiple tomes, I want to focus on one aspect of it - how does it help your business.
If you were reading carefully, you would have already discovered the answer. Data analytics help us all determine whether or not our marketing is working. Let's say that you send out an email campaign. The purpose of that campaign is to get people to subscribe to your blog. Once it goes out, you give the email about a week before you start analyzing the engagement data. You will see things like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, bounces, etc.
Looking at that information, you will be able to glean a few bits of precious insights into your marketing tactics. First, if the open rate is low, you can infer that perhaps your email subject wasn't catchy enough for people to want to read more. If your click-through rate is high, you know that the people who opened the email were the right audience for the email because they were interested enough to read more. If you have a high number of unsubscribes, you could infer that the mailing list you are using isn't the right audience at all for your business.
That's just one example of how data analytics can help assess your current marketing goals and what is still needed. Most of the time, when people hear the term 'data analytics,' they automatically think about Google Analytics or any other system tied to your website. While website traffic analytics is a very important part of data analytics as a whole, it's only one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to digital marketing, there are many different elements that must be watched and analyzed over time. Every month, I complete an audit of InGen's marketing activities, and I look for trends.
This process is a constant effort as you don't want to continue investing time and money into marketing tactics that aren't working for you. As an example, we were running ads with LinkedIn not too long ago. The information that was being returned from those ads let us know that there was a decent amount of eyes seeing the ads, but they weren't clicking the CTA in the ad, and therefore, we weren't reaping any benefits of that paid advertising source. This was something that I watched for several months before pulling the plug - and I do recommend giving tactics some time to collect data so that you can look for those trends - but it was ultimately the right decision.
If you are interested in learning more about how data analytics affect your business and what you might be able to do to improve your marketing efforts, reach out today.
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