Hello all, my name is Naomi Burgess and I’d like to talk about how you can use marketing data analysis to help your business and increase your profits. There’s a lot more to data analysis than collecting feedback from clients to a new product or figuring out how to save time by using a certain type of technology, and after reading this post, I hope that you’ll realise that too.
Data Analysis
Let’s start by discussing what marketing data analysis actually means. In the simplest terms possible, it’s literally analysis of the data related to marketing and customer relations. Marketing departments probably collect more data than any other divisions of a company, because by its nature, it’s incredibly diverse and increasingly important in today’s business world. It’s no longer about dry facts and statistics, although they’re still important – you need to be in the loop of what’s happening with your customers and your relations with them in order to understand what’s working for them and your business, what’s not working, and what you can do to make sure that things work even better.
Measure your data activity
The first way you can do that is by analysing your marketing channels and the sales produced by each of them. You can do this by tracking and recording the activity of each channel. Some of your channels are undoubtedly doing better than others, and if the data analysis shows that those other ones aren’t meeting your expectations, either redistribute your investments so that you’re equally focused on all the channels, or reshape your strategy to exclude the ones that underperform altogether.
Keep eye on your Finance
Another thing you can do with your channels is analyse how much money you’re investing in each of them and how much money was spent per lead per channel. This also can be done by tracking your marketing channel expenses and dividing the figures by the total amount of created leads. By comparing these figures to the actual sales generated by the leads, you would be able to see how successful each lead is and whether you’re spending more on them than earning.
Decide whether to upgrade or not
Once you have all the data from the sales generated from leads on each channel, you can calculate the percentages of sales received from those leads. One way you can do so is calculate the total amount of earnings and divide that amount by the number of the total sales in your chosen time period. This is a good method to use when you’re trying to decide whether to alter your strategy. If you’re keen on developing and growing further, I’d advise you to consider changing your strategy slightly even if you’re receiving an equally large amount of sales from each lead. It goes without saying that you should definitely change your strategy if some leads are bringing in much fewer sales than others.
Start advertising your products on citation sites
The next tip is particularly relevant to those of you who run an online business, but even if you don’t, you should also consider it. I’m talking about web advertising (and not necessarily those annoying pop-up ads). Purchase some space for online adverts and once you start attracting clients that way, spend some time on channel data analysis that I mentioned earlier. Of course, web advertising isn’t the only way you can work on the Internet and collect data to be analysed. It’s a useful tool, but the real web data lies within organic search web traffic. It is a figure that represents how many times your company has been found via Internet search engines like Google or Bing. This data is a good way to tap into customers’ minds to see what keywords they’re looking for when they click on the link to your company’s website. The best way to gather this data is, in my opinion, through Google Analytics.
Track customer purchase from time to time
The last important tool for measuring and analysing marketing data is the lifetime customer value. All successful businesses have recurring customers, and a metric of lifetime customer value is an abstract figure that demonstrates patterns in your recurring customers’ behaviour. For example, if you’re selling organic hair products online, you might have a number of customers who purchase certain products that cost a certain amount consistently each month. This behaviour can be considered average customer behaviour and while it’s not a particularly precise instrument that can predict customers’ behaviour with 100 per cent accuracy, it’s quite useful for measuring the overall success of the marketing strategies over a certain time period.
Use Data Analysis’ as an Advantage to your Business
All the above methods of data analysis can, and should be used, to your advantage. Not only would they represent a concrete evidence of your business’ success that you can use to show potential investors, but they would also tell you how to strategise, plan and make decisions about your marketing, based on real-life client behaviour. Data analysis provides an objective insight into that behaviour, and being objective is very important in running any business, no matter how big or small.
The fact that your company is fairly new and can be considered a small or a medium enterprise is no excuse for not carrying out marketing data analysis. In today’s age dominated by technology, data analysis software is widely available to everyone, not just large corporations. Given its wide availability, it’s very likely that most of your competitors are taking advantage of the software, and you should as well.
