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Marketing Analytics and why is it important for companies to switch to data driven decision making for marketing decisions?

Marketing analytics is the study of data to evaluate the performance of a marketing activity.  

It is the act of tracking, collecting, and analysing data to evaluate marketing effectiveness and guiding future marketing decisions. Data analytics truly enables marketers to understand customer preferences and behaviour. By leveraging predictive insights and connecting more closely to their customers, they can anticipate their behaviours and identify business opportunities.

A smart mix of humans with machines today is vital for growth. Analytics with data science mixed, is the recipe for intelligence, and this is how leading businesses achieve stronger outcomes and work more efficiently.

By employing the right data science methodologies, an organisation can be better equipped to create in-depth analytics - but only if there’s a firm connection between what analytics can deliver and what the business is trying to accomplish. In essence, what is the problem that you are trying to solve and how you can use the collected data to answer the question.

Success cases of companies who have benefited from Marketing Analytics

Sephora (Beauty):

Sephora is a giant in the cosmetic beauty retail segment with both retail stores and innovative online shopping. They have been utilising the power of AI and data analytics since 2013 to understand consumer behaviour and harnessed this for their marketing strategies to build market share, delight their customers and build loyalty. The customer data collected allows them to predict what customers want based on their preferences and to give personalised product recommendations based on their behaviour. With the help of Google Analytics 360 suite, their analytics team was able to identify which online advertising was driving in-store purchases and sales from digital advertising soared threefold.

Under Armour (Sporting Goods):

Under Armour is one of the world’s largest sportswear companies and has made significant investments in mobile apps in recent years, with a view to engaging with existing and potential consumers daily. The acquisition of fitness apps MapMyRun, Endomondo, and MyFitnessPal has strengthened its digital ecosystem, and because of this strategic expansion, Under Armour now boasts the world's largest online fitness and wellness community of around 200 million consumers. The data collected from these apps allows the company to target the consumer with relevant marketing depending on where they are with their current fitness goals.

Orlando Magic (NBA team)

The Orlando Magic basketball team in the USA originally used marketing analytics to drive ticket sales but now uses mobile app data and machine learning to personalize marketing campaigns and analyse game data. This has all helped increase yearly attendances, season ticket holder use of the team app is 100%, and there has been an increase in fan satisfaction with in-venue technology of 20%.

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Why is consolidation of data from different marketing sources important to build a 360° view of marketing efforts?

Data consolidation means sifting through all the data you have, to decide what’s important and what isn’t. It can be broken down even further into a few steps:

• Know where to source your data from. This is a strategic process of understanding where to go to source data, whether it’s first-party data, third-party data, etc.

• Combine the data (social media, E-commerce, CRM, email metrics, web performance, etc.) into a data warehouse. 

After your data is consolidated, you'll need to analyse it. Data analysis is what enables you to:

• Hyper-target personas and understand your customers

• Discover content that works or doesn’t
• Identify channels, campaign types and bidding strategies that work
• Improve budget planning via AI enabled spend recommendations
• Capture competition insights through in-built comparison features
• Monitor brand health, awareness, talkability and share of voice across the internet through sentiment and social listening tools

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Many businesses are building 360 views of their customers and reaping benefits that this holistic representation of data provides, whether it is a retailer, a healthcare provider, or a bank.

There is a pool of invaluable data around the customer journey for example recent purchases or day to day interactions with the brand. To truly benefit from this data, businesses must aggregate customer information, behaviour and data all in one place. With a 360-degree customer view, every company can have a reliable view of their customers and relevant attributes so that any employee or system has access to the customer information required to move the customer forward along the journey.

Data Pilot Customer Success Stories

Data Pilot helped renowned Retail & E-Commerce, Fashion & Textile, Media & Advertisement and Food & Beverages brands across the globe, in building a robust marketing data infrastructure - enabling the following:

• Data Consolidation:

Data from multiple sources (Google Ads, Google Analytics, Youtube Studio, Meta Business Suite, Facebook & Instagram Page Insights and Shopify) was consolidated utilizing state-of-the art data engineering pipelines and skilfully visualized to give actionable business insights.  

• Predictive Modelling:  

AI & ML models were integrated to give spend recommendations – streamlining budget allocations and enabling cost efficiencies.  

• Customer Insights:

Categorizing different customers based on their buying behaviours, demographics, and geographies. On top of this, the dashboard also provides a deeper view of the customer via actual and predictive Lifetime Value analytics.

• Product Analytics: Giving a 360° view of the product by evaluating online and offline sales trends, customer perception (tracked via sentiment and social listening) and competition analysis.

The Benefits of Marketing Analytics

1.  Gain a full view of customers across channels
   Considering the explosion of channels facing marketers today, this benefit can't be overstated - bricks-and-mortar locations, kiosks, call centres mobile, partners, e-commerce, social media and more. A key first step is to develop a strategy for accessing and integrating customer data and then analysing multiple sources.

2. Become more proactive and effective
   Marketing analytics can help organizations anticipate customer and market behaviour and respond proactively. Marketing analytics includes solutions that perform statistical or data mining methods that enable you to develop and score predictive models based on combinations of variables

3. Personalize your marketing and customer engagements
   Marketing analytics enable organizations to explore how customers in defined segments behave differently, and even predict customers’ likelihood to respond to different offers. Doing that enables them to tailor the timing, content, and delivery channel of offers to fit the preferences of customers

4. Sharpen social media strategies
   This goes together with personalizing customer engagements, with the added benefit of getting an ongoing 24x7 focus group of sorts. By using social media analytics, organizations get a candid external perspective, can identify influencers, and can complete the picture of customer value

5. Engage your customers in real-time
   Combining speed with intelligence can provide a competitive advantage in-person, online or on the phone. Real-time decisioning puts all channels on the same playing field enables better customer care

6. Visualize success across the enterprise
   Data visualization brings analytics within reach of non-technical marketers, and therefore enables sharing, collaboration and decision-making to collectively become more efficient and effective

7. Treat data as a strategic asset
   If customer data weren't valuable, we wouldn't have hackers continually breaking in and stealing it. But locking it up in a vault is also not the answer. A balance must be struck between data access for analytics and privacy and governance to safeguard the interests of both the organization and the customers.

Contact Data Pilot to help you build a data-driven organisation to make smarter decisions and take advantage of the technology available to scale up your business. We are there to help you on your journey every step of the way.

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