Best Practices to Analyze Marketing Data to Increase ROI

Calculating the overall contribution of a marketing campaign in terms of revenue and profits is obviously the holy grail of the marketing measurement. Predictive analytics has fundamentally reinvented the game for marketing professionals in the last few years. On a profound level, it has become an engine that goes beyond marketing efforts and is a catalyst that assists in making key business decisions and strategies. This has also led to generation of ginormous data. Right from vast and varied followers on social media to targeted unique visitors; it can be highly overwhelming as well as confusing to relate different marketing analytics to ROI. Before we get into the best practices to analyze marketing data to boost up your ROI, let us first brush up our basics:

Have clear objectives: 

You need to set clear objectives while implementing any marketing campaign. You goals should be clear about what you are looking for in the data gathered from those campaigns. Be it active leads, increase in CLV or donor value, or turning dormant leads into active ones. Having these clear sets of goals make it easier for your marketing teams to design precise strategies and campaigns going forward.

Rectify existing data: 

It is very crucial to affirm and legitimise existing data you have. It will help you devise databases full of unique contacts that have transactional, demographic, product, service, and email marketing data on each.

Be informed about latest trends and be ready with proper infrastructure: 

You need to be very well aware of the latest trends and updates that come up in the market. You should be ready to adapt newer skillsets, hire and train resources in your organizations to leverage your marketing strategies and add all the required IT tools and infrastructure to empower them.

Formulate proper marketing plans, strategies, and processes:

According to your existing databases, newly gathered data, you need to eliminate majority of guesswork out of marketing. Instead, with the help of measurable and actionable information, devise targeted plans and campaigns to get most out of your marketing data and corresponding campaigns.

With our ‘basics’ brushed up, let us look out at the practices that will help you assess marketing data to increase the overall ROI

Know the importance of data: 

Knowing the significance of data you collect is the bedrock to assess how to utilize it for planning and analysis. However, many companies underutilize analytics in terms of digital marketing. It thus becomes important to connect performance data with your business outcomes. These outcomes can be scaling the revenue through customer growth and acquisition, or scaling wallet share for current base of customers, depending upon the requirement of your company.

Have a marketing driven approach: 

There is no denying the fact that current digital technologies empower marketers to analyze customer information with more precision and in detail. This is not only true for prospecting but also for current lead engagement. This is the reason why marketing executives back data driven processes that accentuate marketing principles all the way from top of the marketing funnel.

Set clear ROI goals: 

You need to have clarity of thought while planning your initial marketing campaign. In short, you need to be SMART while setting out goals; i.e. your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and obviously, timely deliverable. Your goals may differ depending on your industry, marketing budget, and other constraints. Nevertheless, it is best for your company to aim for success without any sort of improbable and unrealistic expectation. Additionally, understand the difference between KPIs and goals. It may seem like a basic fact, but having a clear understanding of it will avoid any kind of miscommunication among your stakeholders and help you in seeing out best possible performances with clear expectations.

Fend off vanity metrics: 

It is crucial to stay away from the metrics that detracts your marketing team from original business goals. Typical vanity metrics such as number of Facebook likes or fans, PR shares may excite people, but they usually do not correspond with revenue. Instead, it is important to concentrate on metrics that engage users and can correlate with ROI. You should be very well aware about when to use leading metrics and when to deploy lagging metrics. A perfect blend of both will give you an idea about your future action plans while being aligned with your past performances. As mentioned earlier, having X number of Facebook likes or Y number of Twitter followers may be impressive, but it hardly effects your revenue. And that’s what your CEOs and CFOs are looking for. They want a solid input from you that will lead to the growth of the company and thus, you need to onboard everyone on the marketing train. You need to convince your shareholders which metrics are important and provide them with a proper marketing dashboard for ROI. This will allow the marketing administration to easily monitor and access the overall progress on a regular basis and come up with relevant suggestions and improvisations.

Experiment on a regular basis: 

Experimentation provides you with number of opportunities for the growth of your business. Testing these opportunities not only provides with valuable insights but also with viable alternatives. Additionally, this also need not be a time consuming process. Adopt the ‘test and learn’ approach with one approach for a one control group and different action for the other. By comparing the results, you can formulate a more precise plan for your next campaign.

Make use of predictive analytics: 

Predictive analytics is a critical tool for both increasing as well as measuring ROI. These analytical tools help marketers to utilize social, website, and internal data to better understand the contextual and specific information about organizations and individuals.

Use marketing automation: 

As digital channels are expanding and the data is growing exponentially, marketing automation tools are a must. These tools can help in bolstering ROI by helping your marketing teams to use the given budget wisely. By carrying out repetitive tasks, administrating email lists along with performing wide range of functions, marketing automation will help your company to perform complex marketing campaigns even with lesser resources.

In conclusion, you need to make sure which of the above practices suits you the best and implement it. These practices can help you unlock tons of opportunities, get rid of recurring challenges, and help in creating a positive brand image for your company. You need to leverage marketing knowledge to develop engaging and exciting strategies for users, attract as well as retain clients and thus, scale up your marketing ROI.

Article credits:

https://blog.marketo.com/2013/03/how-to-measure-the-roi-of-your-marketing-programs.html

http://www.arjunasolutions.com/blog/8-best-practices-to-maximize-roi-from-predictive-analytics/

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/the-insider/26-10-16-how-to-boost-your-organizations-digital-marketing-roi

https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/big-data-digital-marketing-platforms/how-to-develop-a-data-driven-marketing-strategy/, https://trackmaven.com/blog/tracking-marketing-roi/

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