Marketing has changed immensely over the past decade. Here are three analysis processes that will help you make sense of your data and increase revenues.
Marketing has changed immensely over the past decade, thanks to the rise of social media and search engines. Marketing agencies are well-versed with this new climate and rely on agency intelligence reports to help them prospect for new clients and assist existing ones.
While these reports often deliver a ton of data, deciphering these data isn't simple. The sheer volume is a challenge and applying the right analysis methods to the reports can be a tough task. Knowing where to start can seem intimidating.
Here are three analysis processes that will help you make sense of your data and increase revenues.
New Prospect Analysis
Prospecting is an important function that every agency relies on. It's what keeps sales pipelines full and ensures a steady stream of revenue. While recommendations and referrals ensure a steady stream of prospects for an agency, cold prospecting still forms a major part of marketing outreach.
The key to successful cold outreach is personalization, and data can help you achieve this goal. The primary aim of running data analysis on a new prospect is to uncover pain points and gaps. Given the diverse tactics of digital marketing, it's best to categorize the prospect's marketing efforts into inbound and outbound categories.
Inbound deals with efforts that drive organic traffic while outbound refers to paid media strategies. Begin by looking at the current state of a prospect's marketing efforts. For instance, which of their pages are the most popular, and what are the keywords they're targeting? Are those keywords in line with the primary search keywords in their niche? If a company's blog pages receive more traffic than their product pages, it indicates a possible pain point.
After all, product pages are geared towards selling, while blog pages promote awareness. The company might be experiencing problems converting deep-in-the-funnel prospects into customers, and this gives an agency insight into a pain point.
Comparing a company's digital presence to its competition is also a good move since it can quickly unearth gaps in the prospect's marketing strategy. For instance, if a competitor is routinely publishing ads on Facebook but the prospect isn't, it points to a gap that an agency can quickly rectify.
By gathering valuable data within the prospect's inbound and outbound categories, you can quickly figure out where to focus your efforts. Identifying these pain points in a cold email or any communication will instantly build credibility, and offer the prospect value.
Strategy Analysis
How well is a client's marketing strategy working, and which trends are moving the needle right now? Marketing intelligence reports can help you answer these questions and inform client budget decisions. For instance, if a marketing channel isn't delivering the best ROI, should you move to a different channel, or is this a seasonal event?
The best way to begin an analysis of the current strategy is to evaluate metrics that measure results. Note that metrics differ depending on the marketing strategy. For instance, if a company is aiming at increasing awareness, then metrics such as unique visits to a page and media mentions are good metrics to track.
If revenue increase is the goal, then merely tracking unique visitors doesn't provide much insight. You must drill deeper into your data and measure conversions and traffic sources. Data points such as conversions per traffic source and order value per traffic source are great metrics to track.
Another important metric to track is the customer lifetime value per source. For instance, if Facebook ads yield customers who generate a CLV of $50 while Google Ads generate a CLV of $100, investing money into the latter makes more sense.
Examining the competitive landscape is also important. If competitors are bidding ad rates higher on a particular platform, the agency must evaluate whether they can earn enough ROI by pursuing the same strategies as the competition. Market intelligence reports will highlight which channels are popular with the competition, but this doesn't mean an agency should follow them blindly.
Evaluating goal-oriented metrics and using them to calculate ROI is the key. Measure the right metrics, and the data will instantly point the way forward.
Create the Right Representation
While data collection is great, it needs proper representation to deliver value. We learn much more from an image than a table, and creating insightful visual dashboards is an important task. When creating data comparison graphs and dashboards, take care to maintain data coherence.
For instance, when creating a graph that has two vertical scales, make sure the units that you use for the vertical axes are in line with each other. Using a logarithmic scale for one axis and a percentage scale for another will lead to a misrepresentation that skews observations.
When using pie charts, make sure the percentages add up and that you're measuring the right metrics.
For instance, a traffic source percentage pie chart will look very different from an ROI per traffic source percentage chart. Connecting representations to marketing goals is essential when creating visual representations.
Always Review Your Analysis
Data has the potential to deliver a huge amount of insight, but it has to be backed by the right analysis processes. Always review your assumptions and run reports at the right frequencies. When combined with the other tips in this article, you'll always manage to derive deep insight and deliver value to your clients.
