Today’s post is by Jiani Zhang, Movéo’s Analytics Director.
Marketers are increasingly aware of the power of data every day. With easier access to huge amounts of sources and accelerated development of analytical approaches, data enables them to enhance and prove the impact of marketing investment on business growth. They achieve the transformation of roles from cost centers to profit centers by making smart data-driven decisions from tactical to strategic levels through development and deployment of marketing solutions. That’s how data has come to the forefront of marketers’ minds in all kinds of B2C and B2B industries. Below are several key ways data can help a marketer achieve in daily work.
We make marketing decisions for both immediate growth and future potential towards business goals. This is why traditional ROI analysis doesn’t meet all measurement needs. More than reporting direct monetary return on marketing investment, now marketers should also identify and quantify “indirect” impact on long-term business development, such as expansion of brand awareness, deepened engagement of prospects, higher share of brand voice, increase of qualified leads, higher conversions to sales-ready leads, etc.
A proper measurement plan is critical here. It starts from business goals and marketing strategies, provides key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be built and data that need to be tracked. Going with such a plan, you can easily grasp and manage various kinds of goal-relevant performance. This could be particularly important for B2B companies to keep a unified view in minds and set proper goals for the measurement plan. There may be a long way to fully turn B2B marketing effects into revenue, and before all your efforts are realized, you want to stay close with what’s going on.
Data tells not only how your campaigns performed, but also which elements are drivers or barriers of the success. Insights extracted from data and analysis can show directions towards better results through agile actions and changes, such as reallocating more budget to better performing vendor sources, or driving visitors to content which is proved to be more engaging.
The immediacy and timeliness of digital data also enables you to make changes and harvest improvement quickly, while campaigns are still in process. One Movéo client took data-driven recommendations and made a series of easy optimizations in their online magazine layout. They obtained a 42% higher interaction rate in the next quarter.
When implementing a marketing strategy, marketers get new chances to cumulate data, broaden and deepen insights, and better understand their customers. Such learnings can help reevaluate and enrich any step of existing strategies, build more a customer-centric experience, provide more cost-efficient solutions and uncover emerging opportunities.
One Movéo client found from web behavioral data that new prospects in Asian markets are highly engaged and interested in some specific products when they are mainly promoted in U.S. market. This indicates a potential to refine and expand the current strategy.
B2B analytics needs to be closely aligned with sales processes to figure out better solutions in engaging, generating, identifying or nurturing sales-ready leads. Due to the complex and lengthy sales cycles here, it may be much more sophisticated around data collection, processing and analysis. At the first glance, the impact of extracted insights may also seem not as obvious and immediate as that for B2C counterparts. However, they still provide vital and valuable information that were previously invisible for sustainable business growth.
Photo Credit: Jez Arnold via Flickr Creative Commons
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