Gone are the days of blind guesswork and time-consuming trial and error to get things right. Now, you can harness the power of data and analytics in marketing strategy to achieve big things for your business. 

It is no magic wand by any means, but data and analytics is an amazing tool. The precision and systematic structure it provides makes everything so much easier for you and your marketing team.

If you are someone who is looking for ways to level up your present efforts then this article is for you. Here, we will look at why data and analytics in marketing strategy are an absolute must and the top ways you can use it to your advantage.

What is the importance of data and analytics in marketing strategy?

Short answer: It helps you make better decisions. 

Data and analytics play a pivotal role in helping you to effectively apply the marketing strategies that you are using. Think of it this way: it is your compass—a high-tech one. It enables you to navigate through the tumultuous waters of digital marketing and find the best way to reach your goals. 

In fact, according to WebFX, 28% of marketers report that their marketing analytics data enables them to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns more accurately.

Not surprising, since data and analytics in marketing can do a host of things: 

• Precise Campaign Tracking - It tracks your campaign meticulously using vital metrics, like website traffic, click-through rates, and social media engagement, to give you a complete picture of how it is faring. 
• Set Realistic Goals - By analyzing your campaign’s historical data, it helps you avoid the common pitfall of being too ambitious and enables you to set realistic goals that you can achieve. Consequently, it helps you create a realistic timeline and help you maximize your resources.
• Optimize Budget Allocation - Regardless of your marketing budget’s size, data and analytics in marketing help you track how it is being used. More importantly, since you now have a better idea of where everything goes, you can easily identify which channels and strategies that will give you better results.

• Make Data-Driven Decisions - But, more importantly, data and analytics give you access to vital insights—which takes out the guesswork altogether. Furthermore, because it helps gauge how your marketing campaign is performing, you can easily fine-tune your strategies and better adapt them to the current situation to ensure you still get the best results.

What can you learn from data and analytics?

It has already been established that data and analytics in marketing strategy provide you with a wealth of valuable insight. But, to be more specific, the following are the metrics that paint the picture: 

• Site Visitors - The number of people who visit your website 
• Page Views - This refers to how many people visit your site and which pages specifically they go to the most.
• Sessions - This is information about your visitors. To be specific, it is their behavior, like which pages they go to.
• Bounce Rate - This refers to the portion of your visitors who leave your website without taking any action. 
• Clickthrough Rate - This gauges the efficacy of your site’s navigation and call-to-actions (CTAs) by measuring the clicks on the links.
• Conversion Rate - This refers to the portion of your visitors who completed the desired action, like subscribing to your mailing list, making an appointment for your service, or purchasing your product.
• Qualified Leads and Unqualified Leads - This is about whether the people visiting your website are the right people. Consequently, unqualified leads refer to people who were drawn to your website for reasons that are not related to your industry.
• Marketing Channels and Backlinks - This refers to where you are getting your leads from. It can be from your email campaigns, social media channels, paid ads, or by chancing upon it via Google.

10 Ways to Use Data and Analytics to Improve Your Marketing Strategy

There is no denying that what you do can make or break your marketing and, ultimately, your business. That is why making data-driven decisions is such a crucial aspect. 

So much so that some organizations go above and beyond to pay top dollar just to get the experts on their team to help them with data and analytics in marketing strategy. 

Of course, not everyone has a big budget to do that. But there are a couple of ways to still use data and analytics to improve your marketing efforts.

Audience Segmentation

Chances are you are already familiar with this term. If you are not, then kudos to you for taking the initiative to broaden your knowledge to the horizons of digital marketing.

Audience segmentation is part of data and analytics in marketing strategy. This is where you group people who share similarities. It can be something like their behavior, characteristics, and the challenges they face. The more specific you are with this, the more personalized and relevant your marketing efforts will be. 

With that said, information is key to this strategy, which is easily bridged by data analytics tools. They can help improve audience segmentation by providing you with important details about your target audience: 

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Purchasing Behaviour

Going back to what we have discussed, data and analytics in marketing strategy help improve what is already there. In this case, because people’s behavior and preferences change over time, you are still able to adapt to them when you continually update your audience segments.

Customer Profiling

The same goes for customer profiling. Data and analytics in marketing strategy also provide you with detailed information about your audience. This enables you to create better campaigns that relate to them the most and, ultimately, convince them to convert into loyal paying customers. 

However, what is the difference between customer profiling and audience segmentation?

At a glance, they may seem to be the same. While they are synonymous, these are two different strategies. Think of it this way: audience segmentation is a flashlight. It helps you understand how you can better relate to your target audience and how you can use this to appeal to them better.

On the other hand, customer profiling is a laser pointer. You learn more about your existing customer base by learning every possible detail about them, like their behaviors, preferences, habits, and experiences. Here, you understand the problems they encounter so you can fine-tune your marketing message to communicate that your products and services can help resolve these. 

Performance Metrics

Here, data and analytics in marketing strategy are used as a measuring stick you use to check how your business is doing. In this case, it is how your marketing efforts are faring. It looks at the quantifiable elements, like the ones mentioned before.

Performance metrics are important to marketing. The reason behind this is that you need to get a sense if you are winning or losing—just like in a game. It keeps a score on your performance. If the numbers are low, then you are missing great opportunities to increase your customer base. If certain numbers are high, like the conversion rate, then naturally, it is a win for you.

Going back to the game metaphor, if the metrics are your scoreboard, then data analytics is the commentator. While seeing the numbers is important, understanding the gameplay will give you more insight into the best method for marketing optimization.

Website Analytics

Another way to use data and analytics in marketing strategy is to keep an eye on the overall performance of your website. 

As your digital storefront and headquarters, having a good idea of how your site is faring is important since it is one of the touchpoints with your audience. 

For marketing, it is more about how your visitors behave. It gives you an idea of just how effective your site is. This is more about how well you guide them from being interested to being fully convinced that you can help them resolve one specific issue they are experiencing. 

One way to ensure that it is working well is to use data and analytics in marketing strategy—specifically web analytics. 

• Understand Visitors' Behaviour - The data you collect through web analytics lets you see which pages they visit the most, what they usually click on, and how long they stay. 
• Improve User Experience - Since you have insight into your visitors' behavior, it makes it easier to identify areas you need to improve to provide them with an excellent experience. 
• Tracking Spending Patterns - You can also track how much money your customers spend on your website. This insight into their buying habits can help you fine-tune how you market your products. 
• Predict Future Purchases - Once you have your visitors' spending patterns, you also can predict how much more they are willing to pay. This can be especially helpful if you have an upcoming sale or when you have a new product ready for launch. 
• Develop Strategies - With everything mentioned above, web data and analytics marketing strategy can help you develop better methods to improve your site’s performance.
• Experimentation - Having the ability to get a beat of how your website is performing, explicitly concerning your audience, enables you to experiment. Testing new strategies you have developed and getting feedback can help you refine and work out any kinks to create a new plan specifically tailored for your site. 

Social Media Insights

Another thing that way you can leverage data and analytics in marketing strategy is through social media insights. 

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more are like the Treasure Island of Information. However, that large amount of data is virtually useless if you do not get a list of actionable things you can do to improve your marketing efforts. 

Enter: Social Media Insights. This is an important tool since it helps you achieve the following: 

• Understand Target Audience - This is one of the most basic things that you will get with social media insights, but also one of the most important since this helps you tailor-fit your content to what your audience cares about.
• Track Brand Sentiment - Regardless of whether you are an established brand or a startup, monitoring the comments, mentions, and posts is crucial. It is like a gauge of how your audience feels about your brand. It is not just a litmus test. It also enables you to identify how you can lead them into creating a community around your brand—which is one of the usual marketing goals.
• Analyze Product Usage - Another is that you see how your customers use your products in their day-to-day lives. This provides you with a wealth of opportunities, like Identifying what other pain points they might experience and creating bite-sized how-to guides into how they can use it for certain things.
• Evaluate Campaign Performance - Social media insight is especially helpful if you have ongoing campaigns. Aside from just measuring its efficacy, you also get a clear picture of how your audience received the campaign and if they resonated with it.

Email Campaign Analysis

Of course, the use of data and analytics in marketing strategy also extends to the classic tried-and-true avenues like email marketing. 

Much like every method we have mentioned here, email analytics is about processing and analyzing the data. In this case, it is from your email campaigns and extracting the insights that will help you fine-tune them for future reference and help you make data-driven decisions concerning the strategies that you are using. 

Here are the email marketing metrics that you should know of:

• Delivery Rate
• Deliverability Rate
• Open Rate
• Read Rate
• Reply Rate
• Submission Rate
• Click-Through Rate
• Click-To-Open Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Spam Rate
• Bounce Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Return On Investment
• Email Clients Share

Aside from helping you make sound decisions, it can also help in other ways as well: 

• Identify Issues - Given the increasing awareness around data privacy, ensuring your emails still push through is very important. Moreover, you want people in your mailing list to be welcoming and not annoyed, which will save you from the unsubscribe button as well.
• Optimize Content - One of the challenges in email marketing is to pique the interest of people so that they will be compelled to open your mail. Thanks to email analytics, you can identify the types of subject lines that will get the most open rates and, hopefully, conversion rates to boot.
• Improve Segmentation - Email analytics also provide you with insights about the people in your mailing list and their user behavior and preferences. This enables you to segment them into groups and provide them with only relevant content that will pique their interest.
• Benchmarking - Last but not least, you also get a better idea of how you fare against your competition. This also allows you to improve your present performance and eventually surpass them.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding your competition is already winning half the battle. This is especially true with the help of data and analytics in marketing strategy development. 

Competitor analysis enables you to identify the top performers within your industry and get in-depth information about them, such as their most effective strategies, top posts, and audience base, to name a few.

All these provide you with the opportunity to do the following things:

• Identify Strengths and Weaknesses - Having a competitor to compare against is a great way to identify your business’s strengths and weaknesses. It can also help you get a better picture of how you presently position your brand and make the necessary tweaks to make it stand out.  
• Broaden Market Understanding - While researching, you may find more competitors that you did not know of and the type of people they cater to.  All these can help you broaden your knowledge about the industry you are in.
• Spot Industry Trends - You can take notes from the top companies in your industry and apply them to your marketing strategy. Of course, it is important to note that these should still be adapted to fit your brand.
• Set Benchmarkers To Guide Future Growth - Factoring in companies that are both big and small helps you create a more accurate benchmark about where your business stands right now. This is especially helpful if you are in an industry that is highly competitive or over-saturated.

Predictive Analytics

This refers to an advanced form of data and analytics. Instead of looking at what is happening right now, it answers the question, “What will happen next?” 

While predictive analytics is not a crystal ball, it does help you stay ahead of the competition. It analyzes every available large pool of data to pinpoint patterns and make informed predictions based on them.

For marketing, this is very helpful for several reasons: 

• Conversion and Purchase Prediction - This is especially helpful for retargeting ads to your web visitors since it predicts the chances for conversion and purchase intent.
• Operational Improvement - This helps you get a sense of where your business is going based on its present capabilities and plans. From there, you can spot the areas you need to tweak or completely overhaul to change the direction where your business is going. 
• Trend Forecasting - Since predictive analytics picks up on patterns, this will be especially helpful in identifying upcoming trends that your competition might not have jumped on yet. 

A/B Testing

Another way to use data and analytics in marketing strategy is through A/B testing or split testing. 

As the name suggests, you create two versions of an ad or an email to assess how well they perform. These variations are then shared randomly but to people who are still within your target audience scope. From there, you analyze the results to determine which one performs better based on the specific goal you set, like the open rate or click-through rate.

A/B testing is very helpful for a couple of reasons: 

• You get a more in-depth understanding of your audience segments aside from the information they have voluntarily provided you.
• You determine the best versions for each respective variable, like a subject line, graphic design, or copy.
• It helps you improve your content since you now know better which works best with your audience. 
• Lastly, all these boil down to helping you get better results. 

Marketing Automation

Last but certainly not least, another way you can use data and analytics in marketing strategy is marketing automation.

As its name suggests, it is software that enables you to automate certain tasks, repetitive and time-consuming types, to increase your team’s overall time efficiency. Usually, you can use a combination of automation tools, called martech, to help in lead generation for channels like emails, websites, social media, and text messaging, to name a few.

Most marketing automation tools available in the market have the following features: 

• Account-Based Marketing
• Customer Relationship Management Analytics
• Campaign Management
• Inbound Marketing
• Lead Management
• Marketing Return on Investment
• Targeting and Segmentation
• Social Marketing

With that said, much like the methods mentioned here, marketing automation helps you refine your marketing efforts, which will increase your business’s sales. Moreover, with the rise of AI in digital marketing, you are able to do more, aside from providing twenty-four-seven assistance to your customers via chatbots.  

• Automation - With the integration of AI, the current capabilities of automation tools are a lot more intuitive and make it an effective assistant.
• Personalization - AI boosts the analytic capabilities of automation tools which provides you with more in-depth insight about your customers. This, ultimately, helps you improve your messaging and content to create a more personalized experience for each customer segment.
• Trend Analysis - Lastly, it finds patterns and trends from large amounts of data more quickly. Having this insight helps you make timely data-driven decisions and make the necessary adjustments to better position your business in the long run.

Final Thoughts

With everything that is shared here, there are a lot of ways that data and analytics in marketing strategy implementation can boost your present efforts and yield better results. 

It is a vital element because it helps you make data-driven decisions rather than going in blind and just trusting your knowledge and gut. But it does not only stop there. 

The insights that you get and the decisions you make are only good if you get the timing right. Data analytic tools enable you to sift through large amounts of data and provide relevant insights in a timely manner—which will help you proactively adapt to the dynamic and highly competitive markets.

Ready to supercharge your marketing strategy with data and analytics? Explore our website to get more valuable insights.