Analytics is one of the fastest-evolving aspects of marketing. Where once it involved little more than a cursory glance at specific islands of information, the role of analytics in marketing is rapidly becoming a highly sophisticated activity, which when implemented correctly can significantly enhance the marketing effectiveness, sales conversion, and profitability of any company. Indeed, many believe that the successful marketers of 2014 will be those who today are looking into analytics across multiple channels and sources of data.
Tools to exploit big data
For most companies, the website is now their primary channel to market. For many it is their only one. Companies spend a large chunk of their marketing budgets attracting visitors to their sites and more funds on content they believe will encourage prolonged visits and conversions to sales. However, until now they have spent very little on finding out whether or not their sites are achieving those objectives.
In fact, our research indicates that just 48% of marketers use website analytics to measure campaign success. The reason for this neglect is simple: until recently the website analytics tools available to marketers have not been good enough.
Google Analytics has given them useful information in an easy-to-access format, but it has only covered a very narrow range of metrics such as time on site and number of clicks. It has told marketers nothing about the broader commercial outcomes such as which content encourages visitors to request a quote, which visitors become customers, or which onsite actions tend to correlate to high value customers.
This is a significant opportunity and an issue which is becoming ever more pressing with the growing focus on big data. Take CBS Interactive for example. As the world’s largest syndicator of B2B content it holds content on more than 10m products at any one point and has 12,000 manufacturers as customers. It records 10m data points a day. That is without doubt big data. Think of the rich, actionable insight that could be extracted with the right analytics tools.
That is precisely what CBS Interactive did. It applied business intelligence tools to analyse its data and provide manufacturers with information on when and where to advertise. It produced benefits across the board but for one customer where it did precise A/B testing it saw a 10% uplift in sales. Given that CBS Interactive’s customers are the likes of Canon and Lenovo, a 10% rise in sales equates to significant revenue.
Finding the right customers
While for many marketers website analytics are a vital source of information, they are not the only source. By combining data from the website with information from CRM systems, customer support services and the finance department companies can get a complete, 360-degree view of how customers interact with them at every single point.
For example, Jive Software, a provider of cloud-based collaboration software, gains most of its leads from an on-site 30-day free trial offer. It had always known this worked but had never been able to precisely track individual triallists. By linking its web analytics to data held in Salesforce, Jive’s marketing team could track which campaigns resulted in which sign-ups and its sales team could more accurately prioritise sales leads.
Yet Jive Software went even further. It also linked its website analytics to its financial management software, Netsuite, and so gained a clear view of which prospects actually spent money, rather than simply made a booking. By using business intelligence in this way, Jive is now able to direct its marketing spend and sales activity towards customers that it knows are most likely to generate revenue.
It is not only the quantity of customers that can be improved by a more sophisticated approach to website analytics; it is also the quality of customers.
The new breed of marketer
It is not only the quantity of customers that can be improved by a more sophisticated approach to website analytics; it is also the quality of customers. Being able to spot who will become high value customers from their activities across marketing channels will be the holy grail for companies, as this will provide them with faster revenue and more opportunity.
Bringing data together so that you can spot the best potential customers in terms of spend and value to the company relies on having good data across the business, and the tools to examine this data in detail.
This will present a challenge for those working in company marketing departments: marketing will no longer be about creative guesswork, but it will be increasingly about gaining and acting upon informed insight. This is transforming the skills and experience required of marketers, as well as the way marketers go about their day-to-day lives.
It is essential that they embrace this change. The opportunities presented by analytics are too compelling to ignore. According to research by Ifbyphone, 82% of marketers already say their executive management expects every campaign to be measured, but less than a third can effectively evaluate the return on investment of each channel. For the marketers of tomorrow, neglecting analytics in that way will no longer be an option.
By Wynn white, Vice President of Marketing at Birst.
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