Thanks to the recent explosion in data intelligence marketing intelligence is now more focused, granular and therefore valuable, then ever before. In turn, this allows businesses to stay relevant, authentic and engaging while helping to improve companies’ fundamental understanding of customer needs, attitudes and habits.
Depending on what industry you are in, insights can be used to fulfil many different businesses aims and objectives. Whether the aim is to target new consumers based on characteristics matches to existing customers or to make more informed decisions across all marketing channels like email, social media and their main websites.
With this knowledge further techniques and platforms can be used in order to better your company brand and your marketing messages. One platform that can be used is Marketing Automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation enables an organisation to use the customer and operational data it collects to design more effective campaigns and lead-nurturing efforts. By using this tool organisations can create personalised messages that encourage better engagement as it helps build trust and loyalty between a brand and their customers consequently enriching the customer lifecycle.
This form of marketing allows an organisation to expand their marketing reach, acquiring new customers without having to increase the number of staff. Tasks such as campaign planning, creation and management, model-based marketing and campaign customisation are all automatically completed by the software giving the organisation the ability to reuse, modify and update campaign activities quickly and easily.
Role of Analytics
Analytics play a huge part in both marketing automation and marketing insights in general. Having an in-depth knowledge of how you audience behaves and interacts with both your website and your organisation will help to make easier, faster and more targeted campaigns.
With marketing automation analytical value scores become your measuring stick and the need for gut-feel marketing goes away and in terms of general insights, analytics helped to shed light on your audience therefore helping to steer the conversation towards their interests.
However, it can be easy to get lost in all of the statistics and terminology that is updated regularly; how do you filter out the noise to be able to find the information that is relevant to a particular campaign or aspect of an organisation?
The first thing to do to tackle analytics is to understand the jargon. Each report supplied by Google Analytics corresponds with a different aspect of the customer experience on a website; audience, acquisition, behaviour and conversions depending on the organisation main focus depends on what reports should be analysed in more detail.
If an organisation wanted to know about the demographics of those visiting their website, the audience report would be the perfect tool. Not only does it give you insight into the countries and cities that your website is being viewed in, it also provides you with the top systems your website is being viewed on (i.e. mobile or desktop) and what browser is being used to view your site. This is a great way to improve mobile optimisation and screen resolution.
To monitor traffic and how people are getting to your website the acquisition report is the most useful. It tells you how the audience has found your organisation (i.e. organic search, directly, from referral or social media), how many of them are new users and the average amount of time they spend on your website at any one time. This is an effective ways to determine what platform to target marketing campaigns and what needs to be done to lower bounce rates.
Behaviour reports, similar to acquisition, shows how many page-views your website is getting but also shows a more in depth look into what papers are the most popular an if your website has a search function, what is the most search keyword or phrase. This allows your organisations to focus on under-performing pages, adding in the most searched for keywords and phrases where appropriate.
Lastly, the conversion report fully depends on the goals that have been set by your organisation which will vary depending on the type of business you do. The report allows you to have an in-depth knowledge on how your website is performing in line with the goals you have set, how the e-commerce section of the website is performing, if there is one, and how all of the multi-channel aspects of the site is performing.
In summary, having these insights allows you to create a better relationship with your target audience, gain more custom and get ahead in your marketing plan, enabling your organisation to grow.