How to Integrate Analytics into Your Marketing Strategy

Written by annecarton | Published 2020/01/12
Tech Story Tags: marketing-strategy | analytics | marketing | customer-experience | customer-acquisiton | customer-support | sales-tips | email-marketing

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So you have started a new business? Congratulations! Launching a brand can be as competitive as struggling to find a satisfactory corporate job. And promoting it can also be quite challenging. You may think that it is enough to drive it alone with passion and enthusiasm, but even with these two attributes, you know what has exactly been missing.
If you can launch a brand after months or years of thinking, you can certainly develop a marketing strategy that can help in raising a brand. Your marketing strategy is the fuel of your brand needs. There is your target audience out there – demented, uncovered, and seeking out to be served. To learn more about your brand, it requires awareness and significant marketing campaigns.
Nowadays, to know more about the target audience, every brand depends on big data analysis. Fortunately, we live in the digital era, where analyzing big data is not difficult at all. To fuel your marketing campaigns, we have compiled different ways to integrate analytics into your marketing strategy. But before that, let’s have a clear understanding of a few marketing analytics terms.
Traffic - Traffic refers to the website users who visit your website. This helps you understand how effective your marketing strategy was to attract the target audience to your website.
Engagement - Engagement measures the rate at which visitors interact with your web page. It includes several insight points such as bounce rate, pages per session, time on page, etc. Want to make dominating online presence?
Open rate - During the process of marketing, several emails are sent to the target audience. But how many of them have opened that email? This data helps in knowing how effective the subject line was and how people engage with your brand.
Click-through rate (CTR) - CTRs are placed on the website, marketing campaigns as well as on emails. It helps in measuring the percentage of individuals who clicked on the call-to-action button in comparison to those who only viewed it.
Leads generated - Why do companies build marketing strategies? Undoubtedly, to generate leads and drive sales! You can easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy by analyzing the number of leads you have generated.
Conversion rate - Conversion rate refers to the action you want your visitors to take. In other words, it is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. For instance, in a month, you have received 300 visitors on your website, out of which 100 visitors make an actual purchase. So, in this case, your conversion rate would be 33%.
  1. Sales growth - It is a metric of your sales team’s ability to increase revenue over a fixed period. It is calculated by subtracting the revenue of the current period with last period revenue. After that, divide it by last period revenue and multiply the result by 100. For instance, your business made $250 sales this month, and in the last month, the total sales were $200. So there is a difference of $500, which is an increase in sales. By dividing the difference ($500) with last month's sales ($200), you will get 2.5. Multiply the result with 100, and you will get a 250% sales growth increase over last year.

How to Integrate Analytics into Your Marketing Strategy

Notice your audience behavior and response:
Before you continue to analyze your data to create other marketing strategies, you need to understand how important it is to have deep insights into your audience behavior. Having knowledge about the target audience behavior will assist you in building the foundation of any marketing strategy. Understanding how your audience interacts with your brand will help you gain insight into the success of the company.
Mixpanel – insights into audience interaction
Mixpanel, a gold mine of data analytics, is a suite of tools that help in analyzing the app and website interaction with the audience. It has a modern technology that doesn’t require any code to understand the business. It means even a non-techie person can use it. The data analytics tool suits from Mixpanel are ideal for startups.
Features:
  1. You can segment and visualize your data quickly.
  2. You can learn more about your users.
  3. You can check the behavior of different groups of users.
  4. You can foresee who will turn for more relevant information.
  5. You can see which segment of users causes metric spikes.
  6. You can figure out which behaviors lead to a particular goal.
  7. It keeps your projects tidy.
Track lead generation and revenue - The next step in any digital marketing campaign is to determine and examine the source of the core revenue. Is it through search engines or social media? Even with the utmost use of search engines, you need to evaluate if your keyword research is optimal for driving target audience towards your website for desired traffic. You are required to integrate analytical tools in your marketing strategy that can assist in analyzing your lead sources, thus permitting you to make changes in your campaigns to generate maximum leads.
Google Analytics – track lead sources for maximum profits
Google Analytics is the most compelling free set of tools. It is well-known among digital marketers and business enterprises. Without integrating Google Analytics into marketing channels, the development of a digital marketing strategy is incomplete.
The tools allow users to track data by establishing Goal IDs for the segmentation of business goals ahead. Once you set your goals, you can use the data to analyze from where your leads are coming, thus permitting you to evaluate your investments and accumulate revenue in return. Let’s take an example. For instance, your Facebook helps bring you at least 1,500 leads, while those generated on Instagram are not even a fraction of that. This will help you segment your investment so that you gather the worth of your later funding.
Google Analytics also assists in evaluating diverse approaches used for generating traffic. If, for instance, the leads you generated through organic traffic are lesser than those from your direct referral approaches, it means that you have to improve your SEO strategies so that your audience can find your business easily through search engines.
Social media tracking and monitoring:
Did you know that, currently, there are around 3.2 billion people who use social media every day? And this number is growing. Among all the social media channels, Facebook generates about 2 billion active users annually worldwide, making it the most widely used social media platform globally.
Hootsuite – Social media performance evaluation
Hootsuite is one of the most versatile social media data analytic tools available on the internet today. It helps users to know the performance and response generated through their social media marketing strategies. You can track your audience interaction and response as well as monitor the performance of the content you posted on social media channels. The greatest thing about this tool is that it can be integrated with other analytical tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics for optimal monitoring and integral tracking of user data.
Focus on email marketing
You may think that email marketing is one of the oldest methods in generating leads, but as compared to other methods, it is still one of the most effective methods in generating higher leads and revenue. All thanks to the latest technology! Today, half of the world’s population is using the internet, and they can access their emails, anytime, anywhere. But how much you get benefited from this method depends on your email marketing strategy. As per the latest statistics, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect to get back an average return of $44. For customer retention and acquisitions, many companies depend on personalized email marketing techniques.
Marketo – email marketing
Marketo, a multi-billion dollar infrastructure, includes data analytic tools that help users to up their email marketing techniques and software as per their target audience. In other words, Marketo can assist users in analyzing the right and most accessible leads, thereby helping them in developing the finest content for the target audience. For optimal digital advertising, it can also be integrated with Google cloud platforms and social media platforms. For instance, to acquire customers, you can offer your most loyal audience a free ebook.
Pricing
Marketo divides its pricing packages into bundles so that companies can buy exactly what they require. These bundles focus on:
  1. Email marketing
  2. Lead management
  3. Mobile marketing
  4. Customer-based marketing
  5. Consumer marketing
Every bundle’s cost is based on the number of contacts you have in your marketing database.
Provide competitor analysis
Before you expose your weapons to the world, it’s better to have an insight into what competitors are doing. It will help you draw up a comprehensive plan for the necessary oomph in the middle of the competition, which includes dominant and over-the-edge marketing strategies. And for that, to understand the dynamics and how they are performing, you need to analyze your competitors.
Ahrefs – competitor research and analysis
Ahrefs is a great marketing tool that helps users analyze how much leads and revenue their competitors are generating. You can also analyze the number of backlinks, sources, social media campaigns, and content development strategy of the competitors. With the rank tracker feature, you can also monitor the performance of your website in comparison to competitors. For attaining maximum direct and organic traffic, its site explorer helps in creating a core SEO strategy.
Pricing
Ahrefs provides free 7 days trial at $7 so that users get a clear understanding of its features before going for different paid versions.
Conclusion
The access to marketing analytics we have today are the most valuable resource. They have the power to generate more sales and grow businesses. So, integrate these analytics into your marketing strategy and invest in for the value of money, time, and efforts.

Written by annecarton | My name is Anne Carton. I am a blogger and USA based small business consultant.
Published by HackerNoon on 2020/01/12