Seven ways how marketing analytics can add business value
The rapidly evolving world of marketing analytics is delivering more to the business bottom line every month, and it’s a trend that is set to continue. Peter O’Connor, Vice President Sales Asia Pacific at global analytics software provider Snowflake, explains why.
Marketing analytics comprises the processes and technologies that enable marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives. Insights provided allow better targeting of marketing campaigns and advertisements which, in turn, leads to higher sales and better levels of customer loyalty.
As businesses look for innovative new ways to drive further growth, the value brought by marketing analytics becomes even more important.
The top seven ways in which marketing analytics can deliver value are:
1. Ongoing growth of real-time analytics
Analytics will enable marketing teams to see how their campaigns are performing in real time. From there, targeting and messaging can be quickly adjusted to optimise performance. For this to be possible at greater scale, marketing organisations will need to invest in a platform that can balance batch data loads with processing for business intelligence and business analytics.
In other words, the platform needs to enable different kinds of jobs to run in parallel by adding computing resources to clusters as needed.
2. More attention paid to data security
There will be growing recognition that securing marketing data is as important as creating the right infrastructure to deploy it. As a result, marketers will increase their investment in technologies that emphasise encryption, access control, network monitoring, and physical security measures. Meanwhile, they’ll seek to partner with providers who have comprehensive monitoring, alerts, and cybersecurity practices.
3. Privacy-aware data collection
Leading marketers will also be more proactive about protecting consumer privacy. This will include offering new controls by which users can opt out, purging data once a user has left a platform, scrubbing unnecessary data such as fine-grained location information to ensure it isn’t stored, and enabling stringent access controls.
4. Accelerated adoption of predictive analytics
Thanks to the growing capabilities of machine learning, predictive analytics will get better at identifying the likelihood of future outcomes by analysing historical data. Through continuously improved machine learning models, predictions can become more accurate over time, leading to jumps in customer lifetime value and reductions in churn.
Business investment in predictive analytics is starting to match the hype that’s been generated during the past few years. Some industry watchers predict the global market for it could be worth around $11 billion by 2022.
5. Increased investment in first-party data
Once the lifeblood of digital advertising ecosystems, cookies are on the way out. Google has announced they will soon be phased out of Chrome and they have already been expunged from Safari and Firefox. They will no longer be used to track consumers from website to website and the targeting of ads.
Website operators will therefore have to gather more-limited data on visitor behaviour themselves and then unify it with other first-party data sets to achieve a holistic view of the customer. This is a big win for consumer privacy advocates, but a headache for advertisers and agencies, which will find it more difficult to retarget ads, build audiences in their data management platforms, leverage multi-touch attribution, and do other essential digital-marketing activities.
6. Rise of contextual customer experiences
Marketing analytics will become more contextually sensitive during 2021 and beyond. Given that marketers are losing the rich behavioural data that cookies historically provided, they have added motivation to invest in this promising area of insights.
In practice, this means marketers will be able to target messaging not only based on known and inferred attributes of their customers (for example, their age, location, household income, and affinity for the brand) but also based on where they are in the customer journey and what frame of mind they’re likely to be in as a result.
7. Increased reliance on reputable third-party sources
While companies will invest in first-party data, that data has one significant limitation: It only lets marketers see how people have interacted with their own touchpoints. Amid the sunsetting of browser-based cookies, companies will continue to invest in third-party data sets that can provide a more robust view of customers and augment the first-party data they collect.
Together, these trends will shape the way marketing analytics is used across the business landscape. Marketing teams will be able to obtain detailed insights into customer behaviour and preferences which will allow them to more accurately target their campaigns.
Consider how analytics can be put to better used within your organisation. The results might just be surprising.
