Understanding your target audience, check.
Laying out a strategic plan, check.
Integrating your campaigns, check.
Reviewing and digesting analytics. Uh. Hmmm.
If this sounds like your marketing department, you're in good company. Many marketers don't spend quality time studying and learning from past marketing efforts, although most understand they should. A recent study showed 53% of marketers planned to increase their analytics budgets in 2014.
Various reasons explain why marketing analytic review continues to languish in relative anonymity. Lack of time, difficulty processing information, and lack of oversight are three of them. The biggest reason, most likely, is they are so very boring! Marketers go giddy over words and pictures, but fall asleep when faced with numbers. All that needs to change.
Review Marketing Analytics and Plan Accordingly
For a profitable, long-term marketing strategy to show strong ROI, the team must commit to a plan for analytic review. Five tips to implement a powerful plan for analyzing marketing metrics in a relatively painless way are:
#1: Define each person's role. Avoid the "well I didn't know I should be doing it" answer by involving a few people in analytics. Map out each one's tasks and goals. Build good communication and meet with them as a team to review and hear results. A clear plan with every role attached to a team member helps the job get done efficiently and consistently.
#2: Determine key indicators of success and failure. Simply reviewing the marketing metrics isn't good enough. Ask the questions "what shows us a campaign was successful?" and "which areas are key to success?" Assign each area deemed valuable a goal. When the team looks at analytics, it can easily uncover what is working and what needs to be polished up.
#3: Incorporate automation when you can. Analytic review is a time-eating beast, so it's vital to find ways to shorten the time it takes to find out what marketing needs to know. If you employ an inbound platform, utilize it to return metrics in an easy to understand format. Another time saver is to develop spreadsheets that track performance on a month-by-month basis. The more successful you are at streamlining the process, the more likely analytics will be consistently reviewed and offer real impact on the bottom line.
#4: Consistently review key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing evolves constantly, so that an important metric two years ago may offer little value today. Marketing teams must review KPIs every quarter or so to ensure they are imparting the most vital information to help your team build strong, meaningful campaigns.
#5: Circle back around to edit and refine. Meeting and poring over analytics, then shutting down your tablets and going for coffee won't cut it. Metrics must be a stimulus for action! Are they showing weakness in an area? Then brainstorm how to tweak that part of the plan. Are some analytics performing over goal? Then find ways to bring that idea into other campaigns. Information gleaned from analytics is priceless when used as a tool for change.
Carving out time to devote to marketing analytics will pay off exponentially. A serious commitment to laying out a plan, defining each person's role, and implementing the changes the metrics point toward builds a better marketing machine that increases more marketing assisted sales.
