Why Marketing Analytics Consulting Should be Considered

Thanks to AI and machine learning advancements, it is now possible to interpret data and formulate better solutions to business problems. The same goes for the field of marketing. With the help of technology, organizations can now bridge the gap between business intelligence and market function. Given the power of marketing analytics, it is no surprise that marketing analytics consulting has significantly grown in demand. They are not only vying to make a better sense of marketing data but also extract critical business insights that can inform the larger picture.

What is Marketing Analytics?

From a broad perspective, marketing analytics is done to determine your entire marketing effort’s effectiveness and return on investment. When done right, it can precisely show you what works, what doesn’t, and where the best place to put your money is. Indeed, that’s the core of the goal of marketing analytics: To show you where your marketing efforts are most effective.  

What is involved in marketing analytics?

The core of what is involved in marketing analytics is data, and it is related directly to how marketing analytics are conducted. Marketing analytics can take place over a variety of technological platforms. For example, you can use build-in dashboards (like those that might appear on a Facebook advertisement) or third-party apps to determine if an ad has been effective. For example, let’s say you paid for an ad on Facebook, directing people to a landing page that you had set up for a specific product. The marketing analytics data provided by Facebook would be able to give you a variety of information, including:  

• Views and impressions.
• Conversion rate, or how many people saw the ad and clicked on it.
• Total revenue generated by an advertisement.
• Total purchasers.
• Unique purchasers.
• Average purchasers per year.

And That’s Only the Beginning

These metrics barely scratch the surface of the data that can be made available on Facebook’s advertising platform. You can also export data and compare it, thus allowing you to understand better what ads perform better and what perform worse. Finally, you can run A/B testing on Facebook ads, seeing which of two virtually identical advertisements serves better. You would use all of this information to make better decisions about the effectiveness of your ads. For example, you could tweak the message, the landing page, the picture, or more.  Most tools, like Facebook and Google, offer built-in suites that can make examining the effectiveness of a marketing campaign easy. However, these tools are limited to just these platforms.

Developing a comprehensive, company-wide examination of your marketing analytics strategy can be more complicated. You’ll need someone who fully understands your marketing strategies, available platforms, and the latest tools to maximize your ROI. Getting a better understanding of this information is where having someone to perform marketing analytics consulting can be highly beneficial: Marketing analytics consulting can provide you with an expert overview that you need.  

Why Should You Invest in Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics carry a wide array of benefits, including:

• More “bang for your buck:” Your company – like all companies – has a limited marketing budget. You cannot afford to waste any money. By properly using marketing analytics, you can examine where you are spending your money and ensure that it is being put into areas that will generate the most revenue. You can do this by tweaking the message, finding the right medium to connect with customers, advertising the right products, and more.
• Building a sales funnel: Every business knows that an advertisement isn’t just meant to get one customer to buy one item – it’s meant to turn a potential customer into a lifetime user of your products or services. However, this can only happen if you target them with the right message and product. That’s where marketing analytics come into play. 
• Increased customer satisfaction: If a customer only sees ads for products that don’t impact them or their lives, they will think that your business is not serving their needs. Marketing analytics — and a robust marketing analytics consulting team — can help you better target your ads to show your customers products and services that they will be interested in. More targetted data will make them happier with your business and more likely to give you money. 
• Accessing untapped markets: One of the greatest benefits of analytics is their ability to show you things you didn’t even realize. For example, you may find that people in a certain demographic are more interested in your products than previously anticipated or that individuals are interested in a service that you just started providing. This advanced understanding may allow you to expand your reach and offer newly untapped markets.

Some Examples

Looking for specific examples of how marketing analytics can help your business? Consider the following examples:

• A business uses Facebook analytics to get a better perspective on who is clicking on their ads. The analytics reveal that individuals in the 35-44 age group — not 25-34 — are more likely to buy their products. They shift their messaging and targeting based on that feedback.
• A business compares the advertisements they are running and discovers a wide disparity of cost-per-clicks. Using this information, they eliminate their more expensive ads, leaving them with money to reinvest in cheaper advertisements that are more effective. 
• A business engages in A/B testing of their advertisements. They use identical ad copy and targeting data, choosing only to alter the picture that they use. Once they determine which picture gets more clicks, they expand the audience and invest heavily in better-performing advertisements. 

Click Here for a More In-depth View into Marketing Analytics

What is Marketing Analytics Consulting?

A marketing analytics consultant can serve as the connection between your business and the art and science of understanding marketing analytics. They will speak with you to get a better grasp of your company’s goals. From there, they’ll help you determine what metrics to use, how to measure them, and what platforms can best serve your needs.

The metrics they will use can help tell you how all your marketing programs are performing. It also allows you to gather data from different marketing channels. The data will enable you to consolidate all the information into a collective marketing view. This view will allow you to extract analytical results that you can use to drive your marketing efforts forward.

What Makes Marketing Analytics Consulting So Necessary?

Customer Journeys are complex

The proliferation of the internet has led to new marketing categories, which means the typical consumer journey has become more complex. For instance, today, your target consumer can jump between mobile, desktop, and offline visits before purchasing. With consumer journeys becoming so scattered and non-linear, focusing on just one aspect of your marketing funnel will not pay dividends.

Consultants Understand the Complexity

Quality marketing analytics consulting takes into account more than one aspect of marketing. By considering the entire marketing picture, you can create a more holistic marketing plan that can meet your targets.

At its core, a high-quality marketing analytics consulting firm will understand how complicated marketing analytics is. When done right, marketing analytics consulting is about more than just understanding Facebook, Google, or banner ads. It is about developing a holistic and comprehensive view of your entire marketing strategy, understanding what you are looking to achieve, and being able to properly implement a marketing plan that fully meets all of these goals. 

Look at it this way: Marketing analytics is the most crucial way to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Therefore, you need an expert to help you understand these analytics and make the best decisions from them.

Marketing Analytics Challenges

Consider the challenges presented by marketing analytics:

• First, you have to understand a company’s goals, budget, and limited resources.
• You have to keep an eye on the future and understand who a company’s audience is and who they will be.
• It will be incumbent upon you to develop knowledge of the latest marketing trends, platforms that are becoming popular, where target demographics spend their time, and more.
• You will also have to track the latest tools, techniques, and customer expectations regarding advertisements.

If you run a business that sells toys, books, or plumbing services, you should be an expert in that field – not marketing. Marketing analytics consulting can handle the marketing for you, allowing you to spend your limited time on more pursuits where your knowledge can be more impactful.   

Benefits of Marketing Analytics Consulting

Learn what happened

First and foremost, good marketing analytics consulting helps you get better insights into your marketing strategies. Analyzed data can unearth past mistakes and optimize your ongoing and future marketing campaigns. With the help of descriptive analysis, marketing automation analysis, and customer relationship management, marketing analytics can make a tangible difference to your bottom line.

It not only helps companies learn about the past; it also answers questions about specific topics. For instance, you can know more about the performance of a particular metric and how it has changed over time. You can even learn more about the sales of a specific product.

Gauge the present

Marketing analytics can also help organizations become more agile. For example, you can analyze real-time data and see if you want to tweak your ongoing campaign. In addition, dashboards allow you to see how your campaign is performing and how you can optimize the ROI.

Predict the future

Using predictive modeling like clustering, regression analysis, and collaborative filtering, businesses anticipate their consumers’ behavior. For instance, companies can predict when a customer may stop using their service using web analytics. With the help of this information, marketers can intervene and convince the customer to stay.

Marketing analytics also allows you to assess lead management processes, making it possible to prioritize leads. For instance, you might prioritize leads who have just signed up for your newsletter since data might show that such people are more likely to buy from you. With predictive analytics, you can put your marketing dollars where they will count the most.

Optimization and Personalization

With the help of historical data, marketers can understand their customers better. This understanding allows them to personalize the experience for their customers. For instance, you can segment your target audience into different categories, with a separate landing page for each type. Depending on how a certain set of individuals respond to stimuli, you can tweak the timing and channel of your messaging and even the sort of offers you make.

Together with social media analytics and social listening, businesses can then start to optimize their marketing campaigns, making sure they get the most bang for their buck.

Treat data as an asset

The tricky part with data is to strike a balance between privacy, analytics, and governance. It can also be tedious for any organization to collect vast amounts of data and keep it safe on its servers. That’s where marketing analytics consulting can save the day. It allows you to leverage the skills of a professional fractionally without having to invest in a full-time position or a skillset that might not be needed.

How to Get the Most Value From Marketing Analytics Consulting

Before exploring marketing analytics consulting, it is essential to decide the expected outcomes. For instance, you may be already collecting data, but the data is in silos. Therefore, you want a consultant to help bring together data from different sources, so your marketing team can make better sense of it and create a more comprehensive picture. 

Similarly, your marketing efforts may have a very low ROI. In such cases, marketing analytics consulting can help you identify gaps in your digital marketing strategy and how you can fill these gaps.

Typical Goals of Consulting

Typically, marketing analytics consulting can help you with the following:

• Evaluation of unstructured and structured data sources and defining the analytics platforms needed.
• Identification of gaps and areas for improvement when it comes to digital marketing strategy.
• Development of an analytics strategy that is based on an organization’s objectives
• Establishing a process for insights and reporting from the data.
• Helping fix the gaps in an organization’s data

How to Get the Most from These Goals

With this in mind, a few considerations can help you get the most value out of your marketing analytics consulting.  

• First, be as straightforward as possible with the goals you are looking to achieve. What outcomes do you want out of the relationship? What specifically are you looking to achieve? For example, “spend money better” is a bit broad. If you are confused about potential goals, discuss your thoughts and concerns with your marketing analytics consulting firm, and see what they recommend in terms of accomplishments.
• Be as straightforward as possible with the data you collect and where your gaps are. Remember, marketing analytics consulting is only going to be able to help you if your consultant understands what data you have and what you don’t. If there are gaps in your data, your marketing analytics consulting firm may be able to help you fill those gaps. 
• Keep an open and flexible mind. You have to be willing to take your consultant’s advice and incorporate their recommendations into your efforts.

Why Choose ironFocus?

ironFocus is a marketing analytics consulting firm that provides custom funnel analytic solutions. Unlike most other companies that offer only tools, we focus on delivering solutions. We go beyond building platforms for marketing analytics. Instead, we use tools and software that you typically use to create funnel insights that increase sales and profitability. Our priority is to help companies turn the data they acquire into an advantage.

Growing organizations require business intelligence solutions, which we strive to offer. At ironFocus, we want to help you reveal the hidden potential of your company’s funnel. Our team of IT, marketing, and sales experts knows how to turn your data into actionable funnel insights. It’s not just about writing code and queries; we understand the strategy, outcomes, and how to grow businesses.

Companies should be reluctant to outsource marketing data and analytics to a marketing agency. For most companies, this is a conflict of interest. However, ironFocus is not a marketing agency. We are a funnel analytics agency that helps you build your version of the truth so that external agencies are not responsible for their report card.

With all the benefits marketing analytics has to offer, hiring a consultant can help you stand out from the competition. We help you fill gaps in your marketing strategies so you can win more customers and eventually become the leader in your industry. Interested in growing by leaps and bounds? Get in touch with ironFocus.

Not Convinced? Read This Guide to Sales Funnel Optimization to See More Benefits