Marketing analytics covering marketing effectiveness, marketing campaign measurement and more.

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Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 4)

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B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 4)In this post we continue the discussion about analyzing your B2B marketing analytics. As we mentioned in Metrics to Focus On (Part 3), your B2B marketing strategy should be analyzed for each marketing practice you employ. These days marketing automation platforms are available that provide executives with granular views of how effective their marketing activities have been. Here are a few key metrics that should be analyzed for your PPC and email marketing practices.

Pay-Per-Click

Click-through rate (CTR)

On the surface this metric is pretty obvious but, in this case, we recommend going beyond counting how many clicks resulted from each marketing asset. Focus on the resulting activity. What occurred after the link was clicked? Did your lead bounce from your landing page? Analyzing the activity after you earned the click reveals messaging effectiveness and indicates whether leads are being advanced through the marketing pipeline.

Cost per click (CPC)

Certainly, “how many sales resulted from our PPC campaign?” is an important question but there are additional metrics that can also be measured from a paid campaign. For example, one way to fully capture the ROI is to calculate how many repeat sales resulted following an initial paid click. Did a PPC buyer return to buy again? Consider returns other than financial ones from your CTR; metrics such as new email subscribers from a paid campaign may be worth analyzing as well.

Landing page

They’ve clicked your ad and viewed your landing page. What happens next? If a click-through bounces quickly from a landing page, for instance, it can be a good indicator of the ad’s messaging effectiveness. As mentioned before, measuring activity following a paid click is important. In this case, look at your landing page conversion rate as a ratio against your CTR – that can tell you whether sales are resulting from ads or your landing pages.

Email

Click-through rate

Our view for this metric is the same as for PPC assets: look beyond the number of click-throughs and examine what happened after the click. Analytics tools can evaluate email ROI so you can determine how effective your email messaging is at converting sales. Remember to look beyond financial returns. For example, measuring the number of leads that have shared an email after clicking embedded links can reveal message effectiveness and brand advocacy, and contribute to better lead profiling.

Subscribers

It is important to evaluate your subscriber base for patterns and trends. Segment email subscribers by title, industry, or budget to evaluate what lead profiles are interested in your messages and where messaging can be improved. Don’t forget that your subscriber base can provide an opportunity to expand your reach through message sharing or forwarding.

Sharing/Forwarding

Whether an email asset is shared through an embedded Twitter button or via traditional forwarding this activity, which is recognized as being social in nature, should be analyzed to evaluate message effectiveness and develop lead profiles. Which method was used to share your message? How often are recipients sharing your email messages? Examine which messages are being shared and who is sharing messages to get a feel for how effective your email campaigns are at developing brand advocates.

For more solutions that will improve your marketing ROI contact a Lead Liaison representative today – and look for more great sales and marketing ideas in our revenue generation blog.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Analytics: Turning Your Sales Funnels Into Data

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Marketing Analytics Sales FunnelRegardless of the size of your business, you probably have an idea of what your sales funnel looks like. Just in case you’re green on all this, your sales funnel refers to the process a customer goes through before buying from you. This process spans the time at which they become a lead through their (sometimes long) decision-making process, right up until the moment the sale happens. In most cases, a sale doesn’t mean the buyer is out of your funnel. Once customers buy there’s always the chance they can become repeat customers – thus, once in your funnel, customers are almost always in there. Sound marketing analytics can give you some idea of what stages of your funnel a typical customer is in and for how long.

Many business owners give the side-eye to the thought of truly sitting down to look at their marketing analytics. There are a variety of reasons for this – one could be lack of ability to interpret the data. Another could be the lack of easy tools one can use to track and interpret the data, as well as integrate it into the rest of your marketing plan.

Marketing Analytics Help You Make Decisions

The truth is, if you’re not digging into your marketing analytics to help you inform future directions for your business, you’re missing a hotbed of potential for new decisions and creativity in your business. Here are some examples:

Setting up Goals: Google Analytics allows you to set up Goals in your Analytics install. Goals can be used to track the actions users take on your site. For instance, if you want to see how often users who come to a certain page will click through a sequence of pages before filling out a form, Goals can track that. If you’d like to see how many users from Facebook are taking a certain action on your site, Goals can help you. Goals are a great way to set up and take full advantage of marketing analytics based on your funnel.

  1. You can learn more about setting up Goals at: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1032415 or watching some helpful videos such as
  2. Melinda Samson’s Setting Up and Using Analytics Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDNkXdOuhBc
  3. John Duffy’s Advanced Use of Analytics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijniFqC3PaM

Refining Your Funnel: Your sales data might actually show you that your funnel needs work. Are you overestimating the amount of time it takes for a client to decide they should use your services? Data will corroborate these kinds of hunches.

Marketing Analytics: Putting it all in the Cloud

Every organization should be watching to see how Marketing Analytics shows customers behaving on and using their site. You should be including data from your Marketing Analytics tools in your lead management system to give you detailed info about your leads. What is your typical lead conversion time? Where do the most highly converted leads come from? Are you truly getting the best ROI out of your marketing?

Lead Liaison is a system that can integrate marketing analytics and lead data to show you if your marketing decisions are helping you make the most out of your leads. It’s time to take a tour and ensure marketing analytics informs your business decisions today.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 3)

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B2B Marketing Analytics Metrics to Focus onPart 3 of B2B marketing analytics. In this post we continue the discussion about analyzing your B2B marketing ROI. As we mentioned in Metrics to Focus On (Part 2), the effectiveness of your blog and SEO practices can be measured in several ways. Such is the case for your social media and content marketing practices. In fact, your overall B2B marketing strategy should be analyzed for each marketing practice employed. Establishing your social media and content marketing ROI takes more than counting click-throughs and “likes”. Here are some key metrics to analyze for your social media and content marketing practices.

Social

Connections

Measuring the sales effectiveness of your B2B social campaign should not only be focused on esoteric behavior such as “likes” or followers. While metrics about linking can be an important indicator of brand awareness or favorability, those numbers represent a shallow level of engagement. Which social channels are actually driving sales? Connecting social engagement with revenues is more effective in evaluating social media ROI. Examine the number of conversions resulting from social connections to see how effectively your social messaging is being received.

Engagement (Comment Streams)

As with blogging, articles, and other channels that provide feedback via comments, social conversations should be analyzed. The unstructured conversations that revolve around your brand provide deeper insight into your markets compared to less expository activities like website visits. Social media monitoring should include a thorough analysis of comments received from Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and other inbound channels. Which threads are longest? What topics generate the most threads? Social engagement should be directly linked to revenue generation in order to evaluate social media ROI.

Channel Effectiveness

Not all social channels provide the same impact on your bottom line; the amount and complexity of messaging shared through SM streams varies. Although responses through different channels may be similar (likes, favorites, shares, retweets, etc.), the return from social channels is often variable because of the costs associated with SM activities. For example, a 140-character Twitter post typically will cost less than an artfully crafted image posted on Pinterest. Which channels provide a bigger bang for your buck?

Content

Channel Effectiveness

We’ve all heard that children learn in different ways. The same concept holds true for sales. The effect your messaging has on buying triggers will often vary according to the content channels used. For instance, some B2B buyers may be more sales-ready following a product video while others may be prepared to purchase following a podcast or webinar. Which assets drive website traffic, which ones generate comments, and, most importantly, which assets lead to conversions? Are product videos more effective or do webinars drive more sales? Examine which content channels lead to sales engagements.

Message Effectiveness

Within each content channel, the return from messaging should be analyzed. Which messages lead to extended engagements? Which ones drive leads to other content streams? It’s important to analyze your messages to determine what contributed to the success or failure of a campaign.

Shared Content

Once your content is viewed how often is it shared? Which content is being shared most frequently? Of course, the ultimate goal is to drive sales but content sharing levels are also an important objective of content marketing. Analyzing the frequency of shared content, as well as the duration of each exposure, can reveal how effectively your content appeals to your markets.

Our next post in this series will discuss the metrics you should analyze from your PPC and email practices.