Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing, and analyzing data from marketing initiatives — including channels, programs, campaigns, and tactics — to improve marketing effectiveness and identify opportunities to optimize short- and long-term objectives. You probably already have basic marketing measurement approaches running — whether it’s last-touch or a 30/60/90-day analysis of your email campaigns. That’s a good starting point. But you need to amp up your marketing analytics strategy. Advancements in machine-learning algorithms bring precision and depth to marketing analysis that helps marketers understand how marketing details — such as platform, creative, call to action, or messaging — impact marketing performance. Predictive analytics and optimization models take backward-looking performance and identify future marketing investment opportunities to better reach prospects and engage with new customers.
Create A Plan To Launch Your Marketing Analytics Strategy
Most B2C marketing executives struggle to consistently use analytics to drive their marketing plans and forecasts. According to Forrester’s Q4 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2022, only 25% of B2C marketing executives indicated that they use data and analytics to demonstrate the incremental value that marketing has on business objectives. Analytics complexity, an overwhelming landscape of insights-related tech and services providers, and lack of resources or expertise all make it difficult to use data and analytics to drive decisioning. And fluctuating market conditions, customers quickly moving from one platform to the next, and data deprecation compound the problem.
To overcome these challenges and start to use data and analytics to drive deeper decisioning and a marketing mix that can be optimized against business objectives, you must develop a marketing analytics strategy. Here’s how to get started:
- Develop a marketing analytics plan to support your entire team’s marketing strategy. Check out Forrester’s objectives and key results (OKRs) webinar, then use Forrester’s OKR templates as a starting point to outline your objectives, expected results, and metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.
- Take Forrester’s Marketing Performance Measurement Maturity Assessment to determine your marketing analytics expertise. The assessment will help you pinpoint valuable resources that can launch your marketing analytics efforts.
- Interview marketing and other functional key stakeholders (such as finance) to determine which KPIs and metrics they use to measure marketing success. Forrester’s stakeholder templates can help you with detailed best practices on how to engage with colleagues to show how marketing is a growth value for the business.
- Learn about and adopt different marketing analytics methods to fuel your marketing analytics strategy. This primer is a good start to understanding different approaches to marketing measurement, and our vision report lays out how you should think about developing a cohesive, unified measurement plan with your partners.
- Finally, create dashboards that will showcase the value of marketing to your partners. Forrester’s dashboard checklist helps you document your reporting and dashboard needs to show how marketing is driving growth for the business.
What’s Next?
Developing a marketing analytics strategy is just that … it’s a strategy. It’s not a project or an end point but rather a journey to better understand how your can squeeze more value out of your marketing programs. To learn more about various marketing analytics techniques, set up a guidance session and I can then help you determine your marketing analytics objectives and best approaches and metrics to unleash the power of your marketing strategy.
