4 types of marketing analytics (and how they can benefit your business)
Written by Natalia Selby
Marketing analytics is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing you should be incorporating into your strategies.
But with different types of marketing analytics available, what options are best suited to your brand?
In this article, we’ll delve into the four main types of marketing analytics and reveal how they can take your marketing efforts to the next level.
What is marketing analytics?
Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring and analysing your marketing performance to increase its effectiveness. It involves gathering, analysing, and interpreting data from marketing sources for actionable insights into customer behaviour, campaign performance, and much more.
Marketing analytics enables you to make data-driven decisions for your strategies, as well as giving you the ability to identify trends, optimise your campaigns, and ultimately drive growth and increase return on investment (ROI).
This approach involves using software that helps you understand the impact of your activities across different touchpoints in the customer journey – such as Mediahawk’s platform.
Types of marketing analytics
It’s important to know the main types of marketing analytics and what purpose they serve. The four main types are:
- Descriptive analytics
- Diagnostic analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
Let’s explore each of these in detail.
1. Descriptive analytics – The “what”
Descriptive analytics is the foundation of marketing analytics. It focuses on describing and summarising historical data to provide a clear picture of “what has happened”. The key aspects of descriptive analytics include:
- Data collection: Gathering data from various sources such as website traffic, social media engagement, phone calls, and sales figures.
- Data processing: Cleaning and organising data to ensure accuracy and consistency.
- Data visualisation: Presenting your data in clear and easily accessible formats like charts, graphs, and dashboards.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs): Tracking and reporting on important metrics that align with your business goals, such as the number of phone calls a campaign generated, or average time to conversion.
Descriptive analytics provides a solid foundation for understanding past performance and identifying trends in your marketing activities.
2. Diagnostic analytics – The “why”
Diagnostic analytics takes descriptive analytics a step further by uncovering the root causes behind the data and patterns – essentially answering the “why did it happen”. The key aspects of diagnostic analytics include:
- Data drilling: Delving deeper into descriptive data to identify any patterns and relationships.
- Comparative analysis: Comparing different datasets to understand any variations and anomalies.
- Correlation analysis: Identifying relationships between different variables to understand the cause and effect of specific outcomes – such as a sudden drop in phone calls from a certain campaign.
- A/B testing: Conducting experiments to determine which factors influence specific outcomes.
Diagnostic analytics helps you understand the underlying reasons for the successes and failures of your campaigns, so you can address any areas for improvement.
3. Predictive analytics – The “what’s next”
Predictive analytics uses historical data and statistical modelling techniques to predict future outcomes and trends. This aims to uncover “what is likely to happen”. The key aspects of predictive analytics include:
- Data mining: Extracting patterns and insights from large datasets.
- Machine learning: Using advanced algorithms that learn from historical data to improve precision with predictions.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Utilising AI-powered software to analyse data and provide likely outcomes – such as predicting customer behaviours with AI in speech analytics.
- Statistical modelling: Developing models that can forecast future trends based on past marketing data.
Predictive analytics is the true power behind marketing analytics, as it enables you to transform data into actionable strategies and make proactive decisions. Anticipating future outcomes helps you stay ahead of the curve and continuously adapt your campaign performance for improved results.
4. Prescriptive analytics – The “what to do”
Prescriptive analytics operates similarly to predictive analytics. However, instead of telling you what’s likely to happen, it suggests “what to do” as a result of the predictions to achieve the desired outcomes. The key aspects of prescriptive analytics include:
- Optimisation algorithms: Using advanced algorithms and techniques to determine the best course of action.
- Decision support systems: Providing recommendations based on a complex analysis of multiple variables.
- Simulation models: Creating virtual scenarios to test different strategies and potential outcomes for a more accurate suggestion.
- AI: Much like predictive analytics, leveraging AI to process vast amounts of data and generate actionable insights. For example, suggesting the style of messaging for a specific campaign or channel to increase conversions.
Prescriptive analytics provides recommendations to optimise your strategies and maximise results based on the predicted trends and insights.
The benefits of using marketing analytics
Implementing and combining different types of marketing analytics in your business brings several benefits. Here are some key advantages:
- A deeper understanding of the customer journey: Analysing data from various touchpoints lets you attribute customer interactions to different activities, campaigns, and channels along the journey. An example is identifying the point at which customers are most likely to call if they initially interact with a certain campaign.
- Better audience segmentation: Marketing analytics allows for more precise audience targeting by revealing distinct customer groups based on behaviour, preferences, and demographics. For instance, using speech analytics to detect callers with a high intent to purchase.
- Improved marketing campaigns and strategies: Data-driven insights enable you to optimise your campaigns for better performance and ROI. You can predict a seasonal increase in conversions for a specific type of campaign, then direct resources towards developing these campaigns to further improve engagement.
- Enhanced customer relationships: Understanding customer needs and preferences provides a more personalised experience to improve customer satisfaction. For example, you can detect customers with a high intent to purchase and create re-targeting campaigns to compel them to buy.
- Competitive advantage: When you leverage analytics to identify industry trends and insights, you can outperform competitors who rely solely on gut instinct or traditional measurement approaches.
- Improved decision-making: Data-driven insights from your marketing analytics software reduce the reliance on guesswork. This enables you to make more informed, strategic decisions that are backed by detailed reports.
Best practices for marketing analytics
To benefit fully from marketing analytics, you should follow these best practices when using your chosen analytics platform:
- Create customised dashboards: Develop tailored dashboards within the platform that display the most relevant metrics for your business goals. This ensures full visibility over your marketing performance and lets you easily identify crucial issues, trends, and patterns.
- Set clear goals and KPIs: Define specific and measurable objectives for your marketing activities and closely align your analytics with these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase phone calls, you’ll know exactly which metrics and what areas of your marketing to monitor.
- Record and analyse data regularly: Implement a consistent schedule for collecting and analysing data to stay on top of trends and make timely decisions. This is easily done with automated software that gathers and dissects data in real time.
- Focus on actionable metrics: Prioritise metrics that directly give you actionable insights, such as:
– Campaign ROI – This will reveal how successfully your campaigns are driving revenue for your business, so you can adapt your resource allocation to make the most of your marketing budget.
– Conversion rates – This will show how many conversions are being generated by each marketing source, so you know which campaigns are strongest and which need adjusting.
– Lead quality – This reveals the customers with a high intent to purchase, so you can focus on the campaigns producing the most valuable leads, as opposed to campaigns producing irrelevant traffic.
– Average time to conversion – This will reveal how long it takes a customer to convert after interacting with a specific campaign, which can uncover the true impact it has on the overall sales cycle.
– Visitor to call ratio – This will measure the number of customers who call against the number of customers who visit your website, helping reveal the true value of a campaign for driving profitable interactions. - Combine different types of analytics: it’s important to integrate descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to give you a comprehensive view of your marketing performance.
- Use a comprehensive analytics tool: Invest in an analytics platform that integrates data from multiple sources and provide the perfect blend of different types of marketing analytics – such as Mediahawk’s call tracking software.
Utilising AI-driven marketing analytics
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming marketing analytics, giving marketing technology platforms unprecedented capabilities for data processing, analysis, and insight generation.
Using an AI-powered marketing analytics platform will unlock deeper insights and drive more informed decision-making with your marketing efforts.
Here are three key ways AI marketing analytics can improve your marketing:
- Advanced data processing: AI algorithms are able to process vast amounts of structured and unstructured data at much higher speeds than traditional software. This real-time analysis and decision-making lets you monitor and adjust your marketing activity on the fly, to maximise conversions and avoid missed opportunities.
- Personalisation at scale: AI enables personalised marketing by analysing customer data on a micro and macro scale. You can tailor the content and messaging of your campaigns in real-time to accurately target a wide range of customers with a certain type of journey or behaviour.
- Speech analytics AI: Speech analytics technology will analyse phone call conversations and provide AI-driven predictions for customer behaviour – including lead value scoring and categorising successful and unsuccessful calls.
Taking advantage of AI in marketing analytics gives you a competitive edge through deeper insights, more effective personalisation strategies, and advanced speech analytics technology.
Choosing the right type of marketing analytics
Each type of marketing analytics serves a unique purpose and provides different insights. The key to a successful approach is understanding how to use each type effectively and in combination:
- Descriptive analytics provides the foundation, giving you a clear picture of your current situation and past performance.
- Diagnostic analytics helps you understand the reasons behind certain outcomes, allowing you to learn from successes and failures.
- Predictive analytics enables you to anticipate future trends and outcomes, helping you prepare for and take advantage of what’s ahead.
- Prescriptive analytics recommends the best actions to take to achieve your desired results.
While each type is valuable on its own, the true power of marketing analytics comes from combining these types for a complete overview of your marketing efforts. This holistic approach lets you know what happened, why it happened, what’s likely to happen next, and what you should do about it.
You need to choose the right marketing analytics software, and Mediahawk provides a call tracking platform that utilises all four types of marketing analytics.
The platform provides a full view of the customer journey, including both online and offline touchpoints, helping you see what sources are driving calls across every area of your marketing. By leveraging this analytics software you can:
- Track and attribute leads and conversions across multiple campaigns and channels.
- Understand the full customer journey, including online and offline interactions.
- Uncover the activities impacting your marketing ROI based on comprehensive spend data.
- Predict trends and patterns in customer behaviour to optimise your campaigns and align your strategies with your business objectives.
Marketing analytics is not just about collecting data. It’s about turning that data into actionable insights that will increase your leads and conversions, and ultimately drive business growth.
If this is what you envision for your own business, book a demo with Mediahawk today.
Marketing analytics is not just about collecting data. It’s about turning that data into actionable insights that will increase your leads and conversions, and ultimately drive business growth.
If this is what you envision for your own business, book a demo with Mediahawk today.