Getting started with Analytics to improve RoI of your Sales and Marketing

What is Marketing Analytics?  

Marketing Analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing data from marketing efforts, often to reach quantitative goals. It is also the study of data to evaluate the performance of marketing.

Why Marketing Analytics is important?

Marketing Analytics helps us to see how everything plays off each other, and decide how we want to invest by moving further. Not only this, but it also helps to target the profitable customers to improve the lead generation.

Analytics and data are shaping the future of marketing, here’s how you can add the strength of marketing analytics and move further.

1. Gather Quantitative Data–   Marketing Analytics helps you to gather quantitative data to back up your claims and how much a certain campaign bought in. 
2. Compare and Cost Data here’s how you can compare and contrast your data.
3. Compare your social media marketing, paid search, or organic search income
4. ROI on your paid search campaign compared to ROI on other platforms like Facebook, and Twitter ads.
5. Stay Focused on your goals marketing activities have special goals whether it is an increase in engagement, raising brand awareness, or any other activity.

Some of the famous brand examples of Marketing Analytics

Spotify Brand

• Spotify Wrapped Campaign has been creating a social buzz since 2016.
• The feature gives you a snapshot of your listening habits, and this is one of the great examples of Marketing analytics. This provides value to the consumer, and generate content.
• The app also gives you the opportunity to listen with your friends and make a playlist of it.

Sephora

• Sephora is a personalized and the world’s largest beauty retailer with a digital experience too.
• They are utilizing the data such as customers past purchases and browsing activity, the company is successfully creating memorable individual journeys. It also provides customized loyalty rewards.

Advantages of Marketing Analytics 

Marketing Analytics is the practice of managing and analyzing data to answer the question and determine the ROI of marketing efforts. 

Enables customer journey personalization – Each customer has their own journey before purchasing a product, the customer journey has many touchpoints with your channels. 

Marketing analytics help you to provide information about how customers are interacting with your brand, and what are they searching for you. 

Having information at each stage of your journey and once the purchase is made you can map the customers how they interact with your content and message and bring more productivity growth. 

Marketing Data Integration – The marketing department has multiple platforms running and collecting data from all the channels can be a task and requires coordination and collaboration. 

The right marketing data analytic tool can be game-changing by centralizing all your data for analysis. 

Campaign Optimization – The campaign is one of the critical parts of any market organization, if you don’t have any data for your campaign it can result in a waste of time and resources. 

Marketing analytics can develop data-back strategies to drive campaign performance and give your business an advantage compared to competitors. 

Improved Cohort Segmentation – When developing marketing strategies, because prospects have different backgrounds, preferences, and personalities and it’s important to know one strategy will not work for all. 

This is where Cohort Segmentation comes in need as it allows you to break consumers into different groups so that different strategies can be used for better results. 

Marketing Attribution Modeling – It is important to know what path your customer took before making a purchase. Attribution Modeling can give you information by revealing the touchpoints in the customer journey. 

If the attribution is used correctly, it will help you to raise the fund for your project and increase ROI investments. 

Awareness Analysis – Nowadays people more believe in brand names if they don’t know you, they are not likely to purchase them. Conducting a brand awareness is quite a task even if your campaigns are successful but you will not see an increase in sales.

Marketing analytics helps to look at the key metrics of your social channel against your competitors. 

Customer Acquisition Cost – Every customer has an acquisition cost after they move through the buyer’s journey. Measuring the cost acquisition can be done by dividing your final campaign cost by the number of customers. 

How does marketing Analytic help business 

Marketing analytic helps to meet the need of individual consumer behavior and preference and taste. By applying the technology business can understand what drive consumer action, and refine their marketing campaigns. 

1. Keyword Research 
2. Website Marketing Analysis 
3. Campaign Analytics 
4. Social Media Analytics 

What marketing analytic you can apply to improve your business growth 

Segment your customer data –  

If your data has segments of your customer on particular qualities or actions you can be more specific. These include

1. Age group
2. Gender
3. Annual Income
4. Family Status 
5. Geographic Location

Make sure you have high quality data – 

 Data from the last 5 years will not make much sense to your campaign for this year. To be high-quality data it has to be.

1. Current 
2. Error-Free
3. Comprehensive with no gaps
   

Look to Future –    

It’s not enough what has happened in past or what’s happening at the moment. For most effective marketing, it is also important to know what will happen in the Future. 

You can use predictive analysis to answer questions like: 

1. If more money is invested in a search engine campaigns, would it get a better result? 
2. Would a search marketing campaign on 1 platform work well with another? Would your Facebook ad work on Instagram?

The TAKEAWAYS –   

Marketing analytics help you to determine where your attention should go during that process.

1. Gather high-quality data 
2. Specify the question that needs to be answered
3. Consider past, present, and future 

Case Study of Marketing Analytics 

Case Study: Netflix 

Netflix is one of the most famous online platforms where people can catch online shows, web series, movies, etc. When the companies take the first digital approach to customer loyalty, they collect a number of user data. 

With the help of marketing Analytical companies can improve their product, and build better campaigns. 

1. GOAL 

Netflix has a wide range of goals for the company marketing Analytics, all of the organization’s goals contribute to the company’s larger business objective. 

Netflix aimed to go beyond demographics and understand what are the needs of customers- what was likely to convince them to stay. 

With all this knowledge Netflix has created better products and services for their happier customers. 

2. PROCESS 

The company started using a marketing analytic tool which gave them data and evaluate everything, how customers navigate and what they want to watch. 

Netflix started using much more personalized data for each user, Netflix collected data such as: 

• The device viewers used to stream content 
• Day of week and time of the day when users view more content 
• Number of serial episode viewers watch in a row
• Viewers paused and resume content 
• Number and type of searches users performed. 

One of the main things they have also asked people review, feedback on content. These rating help them to understand the preference. 

Is ROI in marketing important?

Marketing ROI is the practice of attributing profit and revenue growth to the impact of marketing initiatives. By calculating return on marketing investment, organization can measure on a campaign-basis, contribute to revenue growth. 

What are Sale Analytics? 

Sales Analytic used in identifying, Modeling, understanding, and predicting sales trends and sale result while helping in the understanding of these trends and finding improvement points. It also determines previous sale drive and forecast for future. 

Why Sale Analytics is important? 

Sale analytics allows you to better gauge team performance and uncover areas for improvement. Understanding those strength and weakness leads to better training and more attainable goals. 

Benefits of Sale Analytics 

It is very important to give priority to sale analysis to stand out high in a competitive world, especially during decision-making scenario. 

Here are some of the benefits of sale analytic for business. 

Promotes better Decision-Making – Access data from sale analytic provide company to make accurate decision that will benefit for long run. 

Working collaboratively allows the analysis to make better decision that will benefit to all. 

Helps achieve the mission statement – Business usually have mission that comprises value presented to client either as marketing plan or the basis of the growth. 

Mission statement is a valuable element, it’s best to quantify value and express them correctly, such as producing more profit for the company. With quantified value it’ll promote the growth of business. 

Keeps your business Updated – Today’s consumers keep on changing their mind frequently, most get easily capture by seemingly good offers. With the help of Sale Analytics, it can provide a company insight on latest flow. 

Always keep in mind the fluctuations happen rapidly, make it priority to protect your business from the unpredictable nature of industry with sales. With the help of data, you can make right move. 

Boost Efficiency – Business Analytics has made it possible for business to improve in terms of efficiency. Since analytics gather large amount of data, companies can decide on suitable plan to reach their objective. Analytics can encourage company culture that value efficiency and teamwork. 

Provide better insight via Visualization – Sales Analytics are easy and even presentable, Business can check highly comprehensive chart and graphs with the help of decision-making process. 

People more believe in Visual things and with the help of visual data business can gain beneficial insights. 

Better Accessibility – Sales Analytics Software, business can readily access data and produce more accurate report. Depending on the software your company uses, it generally allows quick access if the internet is good. 

The sale team can easily access the program at any time, when you are using software’s, it simplifies decision making progress. 

Transparency of Sales Data – The sales data can provide businesses with complete transparency and serves as a tool for mentoring the sales team. The business has a clear view of the sale team progress including strengths, priorities, challenges and weak point. 

Types of Sales Analytic Methods

Businesses can run on different types of analyses, depending on their sales goals. Every sale is directed towards a specific element to generate performance insights. 

Management should determine where they need to improve and which techniques suit them more. 

Sale trend analysis – A sale trend analysis focuses on finding patterns from sales data within a specific timeframe. Many retailers use this method to determine micro and macro trends. 

The method enables management to determine their progress towards the sales goals and detect increasing or decreasing product demand. 

Sales Performance Analysis – A performance analysis measures the effectiveness of a sales strategy by monitoring a sale’s team performance. 

Analysis can also report covering win rate, revenue growth, profit margins, and any other area of interest. It also shows their sales team their current performance level. 

Predictive Sale Analysis – A predictive sale analysis is generated by forecasting software, which uses historical trends to anticipate future risks and opportunities. This enables companies to mitigate threats. 

By utilizing predictive solutions, businesses can improve conversion rates and opportunities to upsell, sales and revenue. 

Sales Pipeline Analysis – Sales Pipeline Analysis monitors the consumer’s activities before they are finalizing a sale or abandoning their shopping cart. 

These sales channel or breakdown interaction from a specific source discovers how sale representative should interact with customers to improve the conversion rate and finalize the transaction. 

Product Sale Analysis – In a business that offers several product lines, a product sale analysis determines which items are lagging in sales. A product sales report considers KPIs and revenue breakdown. 

Depending upon what KPIs are used companies can view the product from sale, which result in the management to deciding which product should be discounted or promoted. 

Sale Effectiveness Analysis – Sales management and Sales effectiveness monitor each other performance to teach them how to finalize a purchase. 

This report requires a study that generates patterns to create actionable insights. Accurate effectiveness can enhance customer interaction and boost sales. 

Marketing Research – Dedicating time to research market trend keep businesses in the know of evolving consumer preference to remain competitive. Management can contact customers directly via phone, email, etc. 

By utilizing different sales analysis methods, businesses can gain a well-rounded of their overall performance to determine where to make improvements. 

How can analytics be used in sales and how can it be improved?

Sales analysis allow you to better understand your customer, the products they are buying, and the reasoning behind this behavior. It becomes easy to highlight your profitable customers, and keeping these customers engaged is the key to increasing overall profitability. 

Some of the important ways to improve sale analytics are: 

Predict your customer buying behavior – Sales are quite predictable 

Now, imagine you are running a supermarket and every day or on weekend you visit to pick up some groceries. 

Your customers are no different, they will purchase the product, run out of stock and then buy from you. The main key is to know when they buy, how much they buy, and what they buy. 

Identifying strong and weak points –  If you are a wholesaler or distributor, you have lots of product to sell, knowing which ones are the strong seller. Analyzing product sales trends from the previous transaction is a great way to spot when a product is quickly declining. 

You’ll find that, due to competition, a product profit margin is inconsistent or quantities are changing. 

Spot slipping customers – As said in earlier details you can keep track of your products trends but more importantly, using analytics you can monitor your customers too. 

For example: You are selling a product XYZ and a customer hasn’t purchased the product you from last 2 months, do you really think they have stopped buying that particular product? 

This is the time to pick up the call and ask!

Monitor customer engagement with your company – It is important to know when a customer last called and when was the last time, they visited your online shop and bought any products. 

With the help of data analytics, you can segment your customers by engagement and prioritize them, and if they haven’t been contacted for a while, they are at risk of leaving.

Better Segmentation – The more your sale data is analyzed, the better information you’ll have that will help you to segment your data into useful action for customers. 

For example: You have created a market campaign that targets all the customers who have bought cement from you in the last 3 months. It is based on a certain location where the stock level is high but not any sand and Gravel. 

These two products will go hand in hand and you could offer a 20% discount to those clients who purchase both. 

How sales analytics help you to grow in your business ?

It helps to figure out different actionable strategies and sales models that can help to improve revenue. Analyzing sales data can also help businesses to see what led to the success of their previous sales campaigns and define future sales goals based on the trend. 

Sales Analytics are divided into four categories – 

• Descriptive 
• Diagnostic
• Predictive 
• Prescriptive 

1. Descriptive sales give details look at the sales-related data. 
2. While Diagnostic sales analytics explain observation and sale trends
3. The predictive analysis makes prediction of future trends 
4. Prescriptive simplifies how the plan of action can be put in future 

Some of the sale analytics that helps you to grow your business are: 

1. Pricing Analytics – It helps you to give a brief look at your past sales performance so you can recognize the price point. This can help you to modify your pricing strategy for your future goals. 
2. Market size Analytics – It helps you to understand the market and see if there is enough potential growth for your business. It will help you to put a reasonable cap on your sales campaign or when a new product is launched. 
3. Non-customer Analytics – It helps you to identify people who are not buying from you and get some feedback from them, it will open up more opportunities and expand your business reach and help to drive more revenue. 
4. Competitor Analytics – It gives your insight into how your customers are doing in the market and what makes them better and poor. You can learn from them how they pitch their sales and see employ strategies. 
5. Sales Channel Analytics – It allows you to find which channels are more effective in drawing revenue for your business. 

How can analytics be used in sales and how can be it improved?

What happens when your sale graph is going below? A number of factors can affect whether or not your sales team can close deals. 

Sales performance gets affected by training or content management, customer experience, cross-functional, and your company culture. 

Whereas on the other side successful sales result from company-wide commitment, which means empowering reps with content, training, and guidance. You can also build supportive company culture and many other things. 

How can you make a successful increase in your sales?

Hire the right people – For sales people the first and foremost is hiring, it’s important to recognize that top talent is the result of great training. 

When you think of the team, it’s important to look for sort skills and personality traits to make someone receptive to your training and coaching efforts. 

Maintain Relationships – “Once a customer, is always a customer” – this is the motto that one should learn in their business to increase sales in business. 

Focus on maintaining relationships with your customer by making them feel valued so that they stick around.   

Increase sales by providing Value – How can you make your customer feel more valued?

1. Thanks, them for their support
2. Personalize the communication
3. Follow up after purchase
4. Ask for feedback 
5. Engage and respond to them on various social media platforms

Sell the Benefit, not the product – Usually, people don’t buy the product, they buy the result that the product will give when marketing and selling your products or service will help you focus on its benefits. 

Don’t be very pushy with your products and make them feel irritated, first help to seek others. Because remember customers value your product and the service that you provide them. 

Develop your competitive Advantage – You are not the only one selling your specific product or service, so it’s very critical to explain the benefits or results that your customer will receive from purchasing your product or service. 

In order to develop a competitive advantage, you must know what else is going on out there. 

Pick the right price – The price you set for your product or service is important, not only it will affect your profit, but also affect the value of what you’re offering. 

You need to understand the cost associated with producing the product and get a feel for what your ideal customers would be willing to pay for it. 

Market Content on Multiple Channels – As a part to increase the sales should be continually seeking a creative way to improve your advertising and promotional efforts to reach new customers. 

Mediums like; Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, email, podcasts, etc. can help you to reach out to the audience. 

How do you write a case study? 

1. Introduce the customer, set the case study with an introduction
2. State the problem, every product or service is a solution to the problem 
3. Introduce your product 
4. Show result 
5. Prove it 

Sales Case Study – 

A manufacturing company was asked by senior leadership to double its revenue within five years. The existing infrastructure is operated in five separate business units. 

This led to confusion around priorities and a lack of segmentation for key accounts. 

Solution

• We performed a deep-dive analysis of customer revenue, gross margin, and SKU data for the prior three years. Of the 6,500 customers, the majority of revenue was derived from the top 100 customers with limited segmentation. 
• We identified areas of “white space” where the company had the potential to sell additional products. The company did a good job of retaining revenue with their existing customers. However, the analysis showed that new customer sales were less than 2% of revenue, which is very weak.

Result 

1. Senior leadership clarified the value proposition of their target segments and customer
2. The sales organization developed a key account program to increase the growth of Top 100 customers
3. The sales leadership trained the sales forces on all company strategies and priorities, this might include how to sell new clients. 
4. Sales leaders also introduce financial incentives. 

How sales and marketing analytics go hand in hand

Marketing needs to see where a lead goes when they hand it off to Sales, and sales need to see what’s been done up to the point of their receiving lead. With the great picture in focus, changes in process can happen in real-time leading to better information and more targeted efforts. 

Marketing and Sales sometimes don’t get along. There’s a definite disconnect between the two. 

Marketing would look at the long-term potential of customer interaction, nurturing the relationship along the sales pipeline. Sales, on the other hand, would be more focused on making a quick sale and then turning to the next prospect. 

But in today’s consumer-driven environment, the hunter/gatherer profile is becoming obsolete. Customers have access to a vast amount of information from which to make decisions, and sometimes don’t see a salesperson until they’ve decided to buy.

Here are some tips on how sales and marketing go hand in hand. 

Walk a mile in someone’s shoe – Marketing personnel needs to go on sales calls. And Sales personnel need to sit in on the planning for a social media campaign. 

Example:  Learning how each function in the sales funnel is key to understanding how the entire process works to nurture and move customers to a sale and beyond

Sales need to understand today’s consumer demands for information and how that gets fed, and Marketing needs to understand what exactly happens on a sales call.

Determine the metrics – With today’s analytics and data mining capabilities, metrics are easy to perform on both ends of sales. 

Sales and Marketing should sit down as one team and determine what metrics to measure to follow customers through the sales.  Terms such as “sales qualified lead” should be jointly determined. 

Automate Communication Channel – Make sure that your systems “talk” to each other. Marketing needs to see where a lead goes when they hand it off to Sales. 

With the greater picture in focus, changes in processes can happen in real-time, leading to better information and more targeted efforts.

Feedback from both Sales and Marketing should be built into the system. 

Management should coach sales and marketing like a sports team – Each has a function that is key to winning and retaining the client, When the ball is handed off from one element to the next, the transition must be smooth and effective.

Make sure Sales and Marketing personnel know how to work and play together, go out for some party or coffee nothing is more effective than a teamwork. 

How to integrate sales and marketing for better results, insights, and ROI

The two teams aren’t full in sync knowing what’s going on both side of the fence, to bring up all the cycles in a line is important. The RACE is a great place to start when considering marketing activities. 

It’s true that neither will achieve their goals without each other. 

• Plan 
• Reach 
• Act 
• Convert 
• Engage

It’s very important to find out clarity in your plan by making an initial outline. You can install analytics into your existing process, like sending marketing emails, etc. 

You need to know when to measure, what to measure and how to measure in order to achieve your goals. 

83% of marketers say their executive desire every campaign measured, but less than a third can effectively evaluate the ROI of each channel. Marketers are using web analytics tools to measure campaign effectiveness.