The 3 Things Your Marketing Analytics Strategy NEEDS!
Marketing Analytics equals more than just installing Google Analytics and looking at your visits - don’t get me wrong, that’s definitely a part of it, but it’s not the whole thing!
The short answer? Marketing Analytics helps clarify how all the marketing tactics you’re using to promote and grow your business work (together and separately). These analytic systems and processes are put in place to offer a deeper look at how the time, money and effort you’re putting into your marketing is performing.
And without a proper marketing analytics strategy, it’s next to impossible to complete or even correct visibility into these efforts.
Note: the strategy you set up isn’t just about going into your various marketing channels and seeing what the numbers say - this can lead to overwhelm and analysis paralysis due to all the data made available!
The key is to set up your specific marketing analytics strategy so you’re only viewing the information most relevant to your business.
Struggling lately to come up with a strategy that works? Here are the three major components to focus on:
Defining Success
Capturing Information
Analyzing Results
Let’s look into each one on its own and define how to set these components up to ensure you get access to the most meaningful data.
1. Defining Success
To understand what data should be looked at (and to analyze that data effectively), you need to get clear on what success looks like for each marketing tactic you’re using in your business.
You’re likely to do this as you create your content strategy! You want to get clear on the actions you want your audience to take after consuming your content - whether through emails, ads, IG posts, website visits, etc.
When you’re throwing together a marketing analytics strategy, you’ll want to tie these goals into specific metrics that can act as indicators of how the objective or the action is performing.
The easiest way to track and get clear on these metrics is through a Marketing Measurement Plan.
This is a very straightforward document in which you take each of your marketing tactics (i.e. IG organic, Pinterest, Email Marketing, Podcast, Affiliates, etc.) and clearly outline:
> what the objective of that tactic is,
> what metric you’ll look at to understand the performance of that objective
> and even if you have specific targets that you’ll like to meet.
Why is a measurement plan essential? It allows you the ability to confirm you’re getting access to the metrics you *actually* need as well as the ability to add or modify tracking easily.
2. Capturing Information
Once you complete your Marketing Measurement Plan and understand what you’ll be analyzing, you’ll want to make sure you’re capturing those metrics.
Real talk: it’s not a matter of if you’re actually capturing them; it’s about whether you’re capturing correctly and completely.
Depending on your digital infrastructure (i.e. the platforms you use and how you’re capturing data from them), you might not be capturing your data properly.
→ Beware of tech issues - these are usually unique to the type of business and the platforms in use. Stuff like the incorrect placement of a tracking code, actions not captured by the default tracking code, widgets that might impact when code is fired and even how often (this results in double counting of metrics) are most common.
Tracking issues can lead to big decisions made with faulty data, and the more complex your business, the bigger the impact of this will be, so capture that data correctly from the start.
3. Analyzing Results
Data is only helpful to you as a business owner if you actually look at it.
The key is to go in with a purpose and to approach the data with intention, which is why we set up marketing measurement plans from the start!
Your Marketing Measurement Plan offers a clear roadmap of all of your goals and helps you define what you want to accomplish through your business marketing. In your plan, you’ll look at your objective and outline the metrics worth capturing to show you how things played out.
Your next step is looking into that data in a deep way with curiosity.
Analyzing data is more than just checking how much the numbers went up or down - it’s about looking at patterns and trends.
How have things changed?
What has caused this change?
Is it applicable to all my visitors or just some of them?
Did something unexpected happen?
Curiosity is your best friend when it comes to analyzing performance!
It’s good to start by seeking answers to a very high-level question. As you look at your data and notice things, you’ll start to veer down different paths offering some valuable insights.
You’re always looking to answer how your actions in a particular marketing tactic performed and how those actions contributed to your business growth. The details you find in your analysis can then be used when deciding on next steps or testing opportunities.
→ Think of the analysis details as the stuff you can play with - to try out new ideas or continue doing more of a thing that’s worked well.
When you’re spending effort, time, and money on various marketing tactics (and let’s be honest, we all are!), you just can’t ignore or underestimate the importance of using your data to check how they’re working!
Feeling overwhelmed by analytics? Want support in setting up your Marketing Analytics Strategy? Reach out, and let’s chat about how I can help you get organized.