The democratization of marketing technology has made it easy for any organization to deploy tools and platforms that can harness technology to drive business results. However, deployment is no guarantee that businesses will achieve their marketing goals. A business must be able to build a layer of mission-critical insights over its marketing life cycle (MLC).
The following is a simplified version of an MLC. The dotted circle denotes the layer of business insights. This analytics-powered layer enables marketers to define marketing goals in the planning phase, achieve tactical goals in the execution phase, and finally help businesses realize their strategic marketing goals. This analytics-powered MLC works well even in an omnichannel marketing environment, built with multiple marketing and ad platforms.
In this blog, we’ll build a layer of marketing insights for an online retail store that wants to promote its upcoming seasonal sale. This business has a website, and is present on social media. They’ve also decided to run pay-per-click (PPC) and email campaigns to promote their upcoming seasonal sale. Now let’s see how analytics (Zoho Analytics) can power the 3 stages of this business’ MLC to achieve their marketing goals.
Plan
The first step for the marketing team is to define specific goals and KPIs for its campaigns to promote the upcoming seasonal sale. These goals could be something like lead generation, brand visibility, or customer engagement.
Upon defining the goals, marketers will need to identify their audience to tailor their content strategy. Once this is done, the investments get finalized and the campaigns are rolled out across multiple media.
Let’s see how analytics can power this planning workflow with insights, by getting to know more about the audience being targeted for this campaign.
In this custom-built dashboard, we’ve analyzed two crucial digital assets for any business—its website and its social media handle (Instagram).
While most of their website visitors are from the US, their social media followers are largely from the UK. Having learned the geographic distribution of its audiences, this online retail store can now consider adding regional flavor to its campaigns, for better engagement. On the website, the audience is mostly males, aged between 25 and 34. Whereas their social media handle has a relatively younger crowd of followers, aged between 18 and 24.
With these powerful insights, the online retailer can now target the right audience for its upcoming seasonal sale. We’ve previously discussed how analytics can help marketers tailor their content strategy in one of our webinars.
Execute
Having rolled out the campaigns to promote the seasonal sale, it’s now crucial for the marketing team to monitor their tactical goals to steer the campaigns to success. These goals are like checkpoints, to ensure that the campaigns are in line with the goals defined in the planning phase. We call this assessment operational analytics or checkpoint analytics.
Upon defining their tactical goals, marketers need to decide on the relevant KPIs to be monitored. By running a micro-level analysis on these KPIs, marketers can get granular insights on the campaigns’ performance to further optimize them.
Now let’s see how analytics can power this execution workflow with insights, by performing a microanalysis on the KPIs to check the campaigns’ health.
We’ve run a microanalysis on the emailer campaign to promote the on-going seasonal sale, and the insights are presented on this operational dashboard.
The average open rate is 54%. If this is way below the industry standard, marketers can take another look at the emailer’s subject line, as it has a direct impact on the open rates. The total number of clicks (148) can be improved by experimenting on the content of the email, or with a call to action (CTA). Marketers can also take cues from campaign 6, which has the highest open and click rates, to optimize other email campaigns.
With these powerful insights, the online retail store can now understand whether their campaigns are in line with their goals defined in the planning phase. We’ve also discussed how analytics can help marketers keep a close watch over their PPC campaigns in our webinar.
Measure and restrategize
And here are the results! This outcome analysis is a holistic assessment of the marketing efforts intended to promote the seasonal sale. It tells the online retail store whether the promotions have helped them achieve their strategic goals for the seasonal sale.
With the help of analytics, marketers can uncover macro insights in this phase, to help restrategize their marketing efforts.
This custom-built dashboard encompasses the mission-critical metrics that define the success of the campaigns. This online retail store primarily considers revenue, expenses, ROI, ROI%, and NPS as measures of success. We’ve discussed how campaign-specific revenue can be calculated in our webinar.
Marketers may want to deploy ad group 4’s ad strategy, which has the highest ROI% (50.3%) and conversion% (9.4%), to other ad groups, as well. Campaign 6, which had the highest open and click rates, also has the highest ROI% (236.8%). The revenue by expense reports can help marketers identify their investment avenues to optimize their marketing spends.
This wholesale analysis equips organizations with the necessary insights to restrategize their marketing efforts and achieve their business goals.
Summary
An analytics-powered MLC can be reimagined in the form of concentric circles. They can be deployed at a campaign level and also at a strategy level.
However, the key to running a well-oiled MLC to success lies in the capabilities of the analytics platform. If you’re looking to invest in an analytics platform to power your MLC, here’s a quick checklist:
Data agnostic
Cross-functional analytical capabilities
Agile
Scalable
Collaborative
We’ve also discussed these points in detail in one of our webinars.
So now that you know what to do and what to look for, sign up to explore how a marketing analytics software like Zoho Analytics can power the 3 stages of your Marketing Life Cycle, to help you achieve your marketing goals.
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