How to Utilize Advanced Analytics to Implement Smarter Marketing Strategies

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Data and advanced analytics are vital to a successful B2B marketing campaign, but they're only valuable if you know how to interpret them. Keeping track of progress isn't enough. You have to be able to determine which metrics are most important so you don't waste time analyzing information that provides little return value.

Forbes reported recently that nearly 36% of all companies are not using all of their data. A 2019 survey of European brands showed that only 19% conduct customer behavior analysis, segment their audiences correctly and personalize their offers. This demonstrates that the importance of advanced analytics is not widely understood, and more attention needs to be paid to the interpretation of the data and not just the data itself.

Forbes has also quantified just how valuable advanced analytics can be: companies that use data insights to inform their marketing strategies noted a 15-20% improvement in their marketing ROI. Long story short? A commitment to systematic, effective data capture and thorough analysis of key metrics pays in spades.

Understanding Advanced Analytics: How to Gather the Right Metrics and Data

It’s easy for the modern marketing manager to get lost in an endless sea of information. But Hubspot breaks down the core metrics that should inform every aspect of digital marketing.

For website marketing, the most important points of data are:

• Visitors
• Page Views
• Sessions
• Traffic (by channel and by device)
• New Traffic vs. Returning Traffic
• Time on Page
• Interactions per Visit
• Bounce Rate

To supercharge your e-commerce strategy, the metrics to follow include:

• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
• Sales Conversion Rate
• Email Marketing Opt-in
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Average Order Value
• Revenue by Source

When designing an email marketing campaign, you’ll want to track and assess:

• Open Rate
• Opens by Device
• Click-Through Rate
• Bounce Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate

Social Media marketing campaigns should capture and analyze:

• Engagement Rate
• Follows and Subscribes
• Shares
• Audience Growth Rate
• Post Reach
• Potential Post Reach
• Share of Social Voice
• Approval Rate

To fine-tune your lead generation strategies, be sure to track:

• Call-to-Action (CTA) Click-Through Rate
• Submissions
• Conversion Rate
• Free Trial Conversion Rate
• Pop-Up Conversions
• Generated Leads vs Marketing-Qualified Leads
• Leads to Close Ratio

If you’re using a presentation format to pitch your B2B products or services, it’s important to continually track and assess the effectiveness of your marketing content. The Ingage software platform includes an advanced analytics feature that tracks several KPIs, including:

• Page Duration
• Page Views
• Presentation Duration
• Section Duration
• Section Views

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With this tool, you can select the analytics tab and customize your search for specific dates and data. In addition, you’re able to select different reports from a predefined menu and refine your search to add or remove detail as you wish. The Ingage analytics dashboard also provides the option to download a CSV file.

Convert Advanced Analytics into Actionable Tasks

While a solid grasp of your advanced analytics is important, the next step is equally as crucial: you must be able to integrate the interpreted data into a comprehensive B2B marketing campaign. According to Forbes, companies who switch to a data-driven marketing strategy are six times more likely to be profitable than their competitors each year.

So, where to start? Your first order of priority is refining your customer persona. Although a challenging task in the past, monitoring behavior can now easily be accomplished with the aid of integrated software solutions designed to track and dissect your advanced analytics. These platforms monitor the interests, values and pain points of your customers and enable you to effectively leverage these insights to develop more accurate buyer personas.

Once you have a handle on your customer persona, you’ll want to revisit and optimize your customer journey. Research shows that nearly 90% of marketers see the importance of understanding user journeys across channels and devices. With the help of technology, B2B marketing managers are able to gain insight into how their customers are engaging with their ads, brand, site and sales presentations.

Also, as more business migrates online, a critical component to success is delivering a hyper-personalized online experience. You essentially want to develop the same kind of trust and intimacy you would get from an in-person sales pitch. Understanding your customers online translates into an ability to personalize your message and tailor your marketing campaign and sales materials to match their specific needs. The Ingage platform makes it easy to customize your marketing materials for different audiences.

Measure the Results of Your Marketing Campaign

Finally, measuring ROI is a must. An effective B2B marketing campaign will identify and track several KPIs, from page views and engagement metrics to conversion and close rates. The focus should be on evaluating how well your marketing efforts increase your company’s overall revenue while lowering the cost of customer acquisition.

Many businesses today run the risk of believing that with Google Analytics they have their advanced analytics needs sorted. What they fail to realize is that there is far more to measure than just the traffic to their site. From pay-per-click ads to SEO positions to the effectiveness of their social media campaigns, businesses need to ensure they have all their analytics tracking needs covered.

This is especially important for sales materials, from pitch decks and presentations to online product demos and catalogs. You can dramatically improve your marketing ROI by utilizing a content platform that provides advanced analytics.

Conclusion

Defining your core metrics and measuring your performance allows your business to assess the effectiveness of your B2B marketing efforts, but a thorough approach to effectively using analytics requires time and resources.

The Ingage platform specializes in creating sales presentations that feature advanced analytics, facilitating your ability to revise and refine your marketing materials based on hard facts. Register for a demo today and equip your team with the tools to succeed.

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