Analysis — an imperative to every marketing campaign
In a digital world there is a lot of information and you can measure everything. You can draw some very important conclusions out of it, if you want, but most marketers don’t do it. Is it because of their lack of understanding, a lack of skills in analytics, or marketers just don’t have the time to deal with it?
When creating a marketing campaign, you’re not only expecting it to work in terms of meeting the KPIs; such as acquiring customers or increasing revenue, but you should also want to know what are the key factors which affect campaign success, or what things could be done better. That is one of the crucial parts of marketing process. And right there is, in most cases, where things start to fall apart and the analytics becomes a weak side of a marketing campaign.
We all would agree on the fact that the outcome of a marketing campaign should be to meet the most important company’s KPIs. In most cases, those are revenue and leads. That means that we do get in touch with some data, usually the metrics such as revenue, number of visitors, number of leads, and customers etc. But all those metrics are just absolute numbers, and what we need to do is to gain more in depth insight which is called analysis. That means that we need to connect one metric with another, or several ones in order to see a whole picture, which can lead us to changing our perspective.
How many times have you been in a meeting or at a conference where someone would present results of a great marketing campaign providing information on revenue, number of acquired customers which that campaign has generated, but never mentioned the costs that same campaign has generated and accordingly — the ROI it has achieved. Even though the revenue increase can be impressive by itself, success of a campaign can best be demonstrated not by parameters shown individually but by combining all of them together. We can not see the whole picture without looking at all available data. So, if a campaign has made $200,000 revenue, had the costs of $180,000 with only $20,000 profit, acquired 10 new customers and we offered a really good discount on the product we we’re selling, we would definitely see it differently than in case of looking at only one parameter by itself — e.g. revenue.
Even when looking at a metric such as site’s visitors, that information doesn’t tell us anything until we combine it with other information.
Exactly that ability to see the whole picture, to see the crucial, in most cases hidden details is the thing that makes a person a good analyst. Many things, at first, seem good or impressive because we only get to see one side of them. An analyst has that critical way of thinking, has a curious and problem solving mind which constantly asks questions and is eager to understand the eternal question — why is something the way it is and what can be done better — because no matter how things are, they can always get better.
You don’t have to be an analyst at some engineering field and predict customers behavior based on algorithms and use all sorts of tools. You can be an analyst who understands relationships between two metrics and who knows that in order to perceive something as it is you need more data than just two variables. You need to:
1. Know what your goal is
2. Use the data you already have and analyze it in order to draw a hypothesis
3. Create action(s) based on the both
4. If it is needed, while campaign is still running, optimize it
5. After the campaign is over, analyze it from several sources
So, if you see a small number of visitors in a campaign, instead of ignoring it, you should ask yourself how to maximize that small traffic to grow the sales even more — always look for ways to improve things because that’s what analytics are for.
You can also analyze your competition, but not just when they have done something good. That should be your constant metric.
When you look at website data, for instance, you can use that data and combine it with other elements, such as offline data and different time periods. Marketing analytics go far beyond traditional website KPIs.
So, next time someone speaks about, for example, a successful paid search campaign and shows you only the revenue it generated, in order to fully categorize it as successful, ask that person how much visitors has that campaign attracted. What were the costs and how do they compare to the other similar campaigns they had or how does it compare to a different time period. Analyze the channel results, analyze your customers based on channels through which you acquired them, segment them and test new options. Don’t just go with everything because you have to be everywhere.
Even though some people think marketing is all about creativity, that’s not completely true. Creativity and analytics need to be complemented and one without the other shouldn’t exist. As W. Edwards Deming, an American professor said: “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. Because of that, whenever you can, increase the power of your arguments with data.
