Analytics & Decision Based Marketing

October 18, 2021October 18, 2021 Stan

Analytics is a key factor in assisting with better planning and insight based on the patterns of your customers. Marketing analytics can aide marketers in achieving a 360 degree view across all marketing channels, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and social media.

In modern analytics, there are four main pillars of data analysis increasing in complexity as you move through the stages. As you understand what happened and what to do in each stage, you are able to make effective decisions to advance your marketing goals and increase potential value to your business.

These pillars are:

Descriptive: What has happened up to this point?

Diagnostic: Why did these things happen?

Predictive: Where is this going to happen in the future?

Prescriptive: How do I take action?

Fully understanding these pillars for your business can help you move from a chaotic state of decision making to a fully optimized one. Grasping the ‘what, when, where, why, how’ of your data helps drive marketing maturity. Let’s dive a bit deeper into each concept, understanding that the examples below should align to your business/marketing goals:

Descriptive Analytics

This is looking at historical information like ‘how much did we sell last quarter’ or ‘how many new leads did we create’. Any good analytics tool is the place to start answering these questions. This is where automation plays a big part in framing historical trends.

Diagnostic Analytics

This is answering questions like ‘why were we able to double our revenue this year vs last’ or ‘why is our lead conversion rate so low’. Again, an analytics tool sourced from a data warehouse that includes both your MAT and CRM data will be helpful here. This will help diagnose the successes or issues so you can move to the next stages to solve them.

Predictive Analytics

This is the ‘what is likely to happen next’ stage. Using predictive analytics can help you make educated guesses at whether a particular industry, company, product type will be best to market. This is gauging who is most likely to respond and purchase.

Prescriptive Analytics

This is the problem solving pillar. If you’ve got this far, you can now isolate issues and configure a specific prescription or response for them. If you’ve got successes to celebrate, you can see the pattern of how they were achieved to make them repeatable.

There are many third party vendors and tools that can work together to assist in achieving marketing maturity through these stages. At a minimum, a good BI tool (and perhaps underlying data warehouse), CRM database, and Marketing Automation Tool will likely be necessary to get the full picture of the business. Having this will allow your company to move through these stages to enable more effective marketing decision making and audience segmentation. Being armed with this information allows you to make decisions and spend your marketing dollars most effectively based on statistical fact, not random guesses. Understanding and mastering these stages can help you make real-time decisions such as, what products to offer which segments, what prices will be most effective, what tactics will produce the best outcome, etc.

We encourage you to embrace these concepts. If you’re looking for additional ideas around deploying decision based analytics, Relationship One is always here to help.

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