What are analytics? Well back in the Dark Ages, marketing was a game of throw it against the wall and maybe it will stick. Highly unproductive. For years, marketing has been evolving into a data-driven science. Analytics let advertisers collect information like how many users have viewed their ad, and how those that view their ad are responding. This allows us, data collectors, to make our marketing better through the methods I write about below.
There are many different types of analytics tools, and we can save those for a different blog post. This article will discuss analytics in general and the benefits we stand to reap from keeping a close eye on our metrics.
Analytics are powerful, and perhaps the most powerful feature is the ability to discern what’s working and what’s not working. Some marketers liken this to a 24/7 365, and less expensive, focus group. We can get live feedback on our products, service, ads, packaging or overall strategy. And this feedback can come directly, in the form of a question & an answer, or we can make assumptions based on user engagement – or lack of engagement.
Everything from the photos you use, to the way that you write your copy should depend on who your customers are. With analytics, we’re learning things like where our customers live, how old they are, and even what sort of music they like to how much money they make. We can use this data to make predictions about our customer’s intent, and predict what actions they’ll take in a given situation.
The next benefit, Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was famously against. But we’re not Steve Jobs. So learning about what our customers’ needs are, directly from them, can be extremely beneficial. For starters, perfect products are rare. So using customer feedback, via our data, we can refine our products. We can give them new features, drop the bad features, and give our customers more of what they want. Or if there’s a need that our product doesn’t, and can’t, satisfy – we can use what we know to create an entirely new product.
As an agency, my favorite benefit of analytics is minimizing ad production times and making ads that are more effective. Collecting engagement data allows us to make educated predictions about what methods will work and which segment of our prospects are more likely to buy from us. Nonprofits practice this, for example, by figuring out who is more likely to donate so that they can market to that donor instead of running a blanket campaign which would waste efforts on those who are not as likely to donate.
Developing, testing new marketing ideas and revaluating results is key, working on a smaller scale before deploying a full campaign. And when we pay attention to trends, we develop a sense things like how to best reach out to our customers. What channels do they respond to best? What times of day are our customers most active, or most available, to be marketed to? And no less important is knowing where they are in the marketing cycle, so that we can give them more tailored offers, content or advertisements.
So let’s stop throwing our ads against the wall, hoping they’ll stick. If we’re still skeptical, we know that using data in marketing dates back to the 1800s, with Sears and LL Bean being early adopters. And recently, with the advent of digital advertising, the practice is becoming even more prevalent. A Gartner study sights 21% of marketing budget is spent solely on analytics, giving rise to mega-companies like Google, Accenture and McKinsey dedicating entire business units to developing and selling analytics products and services. That’s convincing.