How to use analytics to manage your marketing spend effectively

1. Analytics puts your business on the front foot with competitors

In a bidding war, the only winner is Google Ads! It’s an easy trap to fall into. With the right data, though, you can look at alternative ways to gain a significant competitive advantage without blowing your budget on keywords.

For many organisations, this could be the ability to spot common points in the customer lifecycle where brand loyalty starts to falter. To stop customers jumping ship to other brands, your analytics tools can pick up each interaction and help you identify when it’s time to focus marketing attention on those customers and give them a reason to stay.

2. Analytics helps you identify new trends and opportunities

Gaps in your keyword strategy can make or break your paid-search campaigns. By tracking conversions that come from PPC or display, you can spot any new keywords that you can use to create and optimise future campaigns.

Most marketing teams deal with multichannel, multi-touchpoint campaigns, so gathering insights to understand how to most effectively engage with customers is crucial. If you aren’t currently tracking and reporting on offline conversions – through your phone calls, for example – it may be as simple as bringing in call-tracking software.

3. Analytics proves ROI

Wasted spend is the scourge of every marketing campaign. It’s the one thing your bosses look at when it comes time to review the effectiveness of your efforts. And if there’s a hint that the campaign didn’t generate a good enough return, you’ll find your budget stripped.

Luckily, with marketing analytics tools, you can pinpoint the exact campaign characteristics that work best for you, as well as the ones that don’t work so well. You can see the channels, keywords and audience targeting that are most effective. And with advanced marketing-attribution tools, you can prove the return on investment to your bosses too.

4. Analytics helps you better understand customers

With marketing analytics, you’re no longer limited to guesswork and ‘finger in the air’ tactics when it comes to knowing what will resonate with customers. Because with features such as speech analytics, you have the means to directly access and analyse the thoughts, feelings and concerns of real-world customers. In fact, speech analytics helps you better understand customer behaviour, needs and preferences. And, ultimately, you’ll build more profitable marketing campaigns informed by the insights you capture from real-life customer conversations.

Clearly, marketing analytics brings huge benefits for businesses – whether you’re an automotive business, care home, marketing agency, or anything in between.

What’s more, the benefit really is for the entire business, not just the marketing team. Insights from marketing analytics tools can be applied across all departments – including customer service, product development, and more – making the investment even more worthwhile, Selby says.