With the rise of social media, data-driven marketing, and influencers, marketing strategies have radically transformed alongside the digital age. Social media lets brands more personally connect with their audience, data-driven marketing enables tailored content and campaigns, and influencers promote products to massive audiences. The return on investment (ROI) for marketing has become far better in the digital age, largely thanks to data analytics.
In this digital age, businesses can collect and analyze incredible quantities of consumer data, giving valuable insight into their behavior, preferences, and buying patterns. Data analytics enables businesses to understand and optimize a campaign’s effectiveness, targeting users who are more likely to respond to the message or specifically create content for distinct user groups.
The Shift From Traditional Metrics to Business Outcomes
The traditional marketing metrics of the digital age typically focus on impressions, clicks, and engagement. Who clicked on an advertisement rather than scrolling past, watched a promotional video all the way through, and skipped after the first few seconds? These metrics give a company valuable insight, but modern data analytics enables brands to go deeper.
One of marketing’s biggest problems is gathering the necessary information to bridge the gap between early-stage metrics and business outcomes. What is the cost of acquiring a customer? How likely are they to be retained? Will they generate enough revenue for the business to be worth targeting? A company’s marketing ROI will remain obscure at best without the insight necessary to answer these questions.
Role of Advanced Analytics in Marketing
An advanced analytics platform is a resource designed to provide companies with the necessary data to make informed decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and increase a business’s overall efficiency. Using a business’ existing datasets, an advanced analytics platform grants rapid insight into customer behavior, return rates, and lifetime value for marketers and business owners alike.
The most advanced platforms are increasingly capable of identifying industry and consumer trends, making predictions, and improving decision-making, all of which enhance customer satisfaction.
Impact on ROI Measurement
Through data analytics, especially advanced analytics, marketers and business owners establish a direct link between marketing efforts and actual long-term ROI. Measuring data is about improving customer engagement and uncovering the real downstream effects of marketing initiatives on a business’s revenue.
Industry Insight
“Marketing teams today need more than engagement numbers,” says Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger, emphasizing the importance of understanding how marketable actions translate into business success, “they need to know how those actions translate into revenue and customer loyalty.”
Insights into engagement and actual marketing ROI have caused companies to take a different approach to their marketing strategies, using more user-targeted methodologies to find success. It is much more effective to identify the most likely users to engage with an advertisement and tailor it to them rather than promote a single advertisement to an expansive and expensive audience. Effectively, companies minimize the pool of users while maximizing their receptiveness to a marketing campaign.
Broader Adoption of Data-Driven Marketing
Due to its efficiency, companies are increasingly changing their approach to marketing strategies. Advanced analytics create optimized campaigns and improve decision-making while utilizing existing data, so there is no reason to neglect this new form of marketing. By aligning marketing actions with broader financial goals, businesses maximize their marketing ROI.
The Future of Data-Driven Marketing
With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), data analytics is only becoming more effective at enhancing marketing ROI. AI enables rapid analysis and real-time insight into business data, building toward a more efficient future for data-driven marketing. As AI continues to grow and change, marketing teams must be able to keep up with the changes.
