What is Analytics Led Marketing?

Digital Marketing is no more a buzz word as everyone seems to understand it well. At least they say so.  But each client and industry is different and needs to embrace and use Digital Marketing differently.

Content Strategy, Campaign Ideas, Market Insights, Creatives are the 4 main components of any marketing strategy. Traditionally they have been done and managed in silos where the “ideas” dictate and decide which campaign work and which will won’t.

But the digital world is different now.  We have the tools and technologies to track and measure results better.   This helps to develop strategies which are analytics driven rather than intuition driven.

Let’s take the 4 components one by one and see how they can be Analytics led.

1. Content – Marketers have moved from Customer is King to Content is King. But how do you come up with the best content which can resonate with the brand, consumers and the industry? That is a question which is generally answered as – we need to test and learn. There is nothing wrong with that and we need to try out various strategies to see what works. But what if you can find out the personas of your customers beforehand? What if you are able to benchmark from the available competitors’ data to see what has not been working? What if we are able to tell you what is the Big, Emerging and Positive trend in the market? Won’t that help your content strategy?

Simply put the brand has to have a good mix of content from corporate, brand, local and trends. Out of these 4, only corporate is something which can be strictly followed (unless a disaster strikes). The remaining 3 are contextual and have to change and should be analytics driven. Let’s take a few examples. Understanding that your followers are people of the age group 18-25 and males helps you to understand the right trend for the day and develop relevant images and status updates. Knowing that 45% of the followers are females who love cooking helps you to decide which discount promotions to run if you are a credit cards company. Knowing how much people are excited about the Royal baby can help you to even come up with the next product idea.

So yes Content is the King, but Analytics is the right hand of the King which helps the King govern his empire efficiently.

2. Campaigns – Campaigns have been an integral part of any brand. You can be in the B2B space or B2C, the objectives of a campaign may differ and you may be targeting a different target audience, campaigns help brands make an impact and create a higher brand recall among the consumers. One of the biggest challenges brands and agencies have is to come up with the “best” or as some say “viral” campaigns to attract consumers and most of the brainstorming is done to generate the best creative or a “different” idea. But there is enough research done to suggest that a campaign does not go viral or popular just like that. There is a science behind that. Also the brand needs to know if that is the right ROI for them.

Analytics can drive campaigns starting from conceptualization, target market study, tracking the campaign, real time support for the campaign and at the end ROI calculation of the same. Unless we set the right KPIs in the beginning of the campaign and evaluate them at the end, we won’t be able to understand and quantify the true effectiveness of the campaign. Least said, analytics will help the brand which campaigns to go for so the marketing dollars will be spent wisely.

3. Market Research – With social media getting popular among the consumers, huge amount of data is generated each day. Backed by data analytics, understanding the trends, industry, customer journey and behavior has never been so easy. Traditional market research is good and necessary, but with the rise of social and digital media, not complimenting it with digital research can be a threat for any brand these days. The best part of digital research is that it is faster to execute and also cheaper compared to any other means of research. Not to mention the sample size here can be as big as the entire population of a country.

As consumers are moving from one device to another and one medium to another while consuming content and leaving digital footsteps, a cross channel analysis is the best way to understand the Consumer Journey through various touch points. Analytics should drive research rather than looked at as a support function.

4. Creatives – Creative ideas and campaigns are always going to have a high recall. Don’t we remember the first black & white (monochrome) TV ad when we were kids (Referring to those born before 1985) but like Campaign and Content, creative can be more analytics led. Analytics helps validate the idea and is the easiest way to test if it is going to work (most of the times) or not. It helps you to curate and learn from the existing concepts and most importantly how the competitors are performing in their strategy.

Analytics definitely needs to be promoted from good to have to must have. It should be looked as the backbone of the company. Without even going into the details of CRM and other software’s there is ample data available to make your marketing strategies click. Analytics gives you the science and comfort to make sure you are on the right track and refine your Digital Marketing strategy by analyzing what went wrong.

So let’s do Analytics led Marketing rather than saying yes, we do analytics.