Understanding descriptive analytics: How it helps marketers make data-driven decisions

Do you fully understand the purpose and power behind descriptive analytics in marketing? And more importantly, are you using it in the best way to drive growth in your strategies?

Descriptive analytics in marketing is crucial for making more informed decisions and optimising your campaigns. Let’s look at what descriptive analytics is, how it works, and how it can benefit your marketing strategies.

What is descriptive analytics?

Descriptive analytics is a specific type of marketing analytics that focuses on gathering historical data on campaign performance. This is the foundation on which other types of marketing analytics are built, offering a retrospective view of marketing activities and their outcomes.

Descriptive marketing analytics involves collecting, processing, and presenting data for you to understand and then gather insights from. This type of analytics answers the key questions of “What”, “How”, “When”, and “Where”, in regards to your campaign performance.

With a clear picture of past performance, descriptive analytics in marketing lets you track key performance indicators (KPIs), measure the success of campaigns, and identify areas for improvement.

It’s important to have a marketing analytics platform – like Mediahawk – that can accurately track past performance metrics and provide a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts. This leads to more informed decisions for your future campaigns, where you can replicate past successes and avoid repeating failures.

How descriptive analytics works in practice

Here is the typical structured approach for using descriptive analytics in your marketing:

1. Setting objectives: The first step is to define clear goals for what you want to achieve with your descriptive marketing analytics. This could be understanding customer behaviour, assessing campaign performance, or identifying sales trends. Having clear goals is important for directing how your descriptive analytics will be used, such as what metrics you will track (customer calls, revenue generated, lead scores).
2. Data collection: Next, you need to gather the relevant data from various sources, which could include different campaigns and channels, customer phone calls, form fills, and sales data. It’s important to use the right software that can automate the collection of accurate and relevant data, such as call tracking software.
3. Data cleaning and preparation: The raw data is then cleaned, since it’s often messy and inconsistent when first gathered. This step involves removing duplicates, spotting missing values, and ensuring consistency in formats, so the data can be analysed more effectively.
4. Data analysis: The prepared data is then analysed using statistical methods and data visualisation tools. This process works to identify patterns, trends, and relationships in the data.
5. Interpretation and reporting: The final step is interpreting the results and presenting them in a format that is easy to understand. This often consists of charts, graphs, and digital dashboards. For example, your call tracking software provides detailed reports on the number of phone calls generated from a specific campaign over a certain period.

Following this process when using descriptive marketing analytics will transform your historical data into actionable insights. You’ll have a clearer idea of which marketing sources are driving the most leads and conversions for your business and how you can optimise your campaigns.

Descriptive analytics vs other types of marketing analytics

While descriptive analytics forms the foundation of marketing analytics, it’s important to understand how it differs from other types. The four types of marketing analytics are:

1. Descriptive analytics: As discussed, this focuses on past performance and answers “what has happened in the past”. It’s the starting point for understanding your marketing data, such as how many conversions a campaign is generating.
2. Diagnostic analytics: This goes a step further and answers the “why something happened”. It seeks to understand the causes behind the patterns identified by descriptive analytics, such as discovering why the conversion rate for a particular campaign has increased.
3. Predictive analytics: This type of analytics uses historical data to predict future trends and outcomes. It answers the question of “what is likely to happen”, such as determining a rising or falling trend in customer engagement with a campaign.
4. Prescriptive analytics: This form of analytics provides suggestions on how to respond to predictions and potential outcomes. This essentially answers the “what to do next” question, such as knowing how to adjust your campaign to align with future trends.

Descriptive analytics provides the crucial baseline understanding for all other types of marketing analytics. Without a clear picture of what has happened, it’s impossible to accurately diagnose why it happened, predict what will happen next, or determine the right actions.

Benefits of descriptive analytics

There are many benefits of using descriptive analytics in marketing, ranging from comprehensive insights to enhanced reporting. The top benefits include:

Provides comprehensive insights into performance

Descriptive analytics in marketing offers a holistic view of campaign performance across various channels and campaigns. Data from multiple sources will create a comprehensive picture of customer interactions, campaign effectiveness, and overall marketing return on investment (ROI).

You’ll see how successful each strategy is through an in-depth view of the performance of each of your campaigns. For instance, the visitor to call ratio will show you the number of customer calls against the number of website visits generated by a campaign, revealing detailed insights into visitor intent.

Optimises your resource allocation

Clear insights into past performance will lead to more informed decisions about resource allocation. Descriptive analytics identifies the channels or campaigns that deliver the most leads and sales, allowing you to distribute more of your budget towards these activities and away from failing campaigns.

This optimisation reduces your wasted spend, significantly increases your cost savings, and improves your overall marketing ROI.

Improves campaigns and marketing strategies

Descriptive marketing analytics enables you to continually refine and improve your strategies. You’ll easily detect areas that need improvement and identify the successful elements of past campaigns that can be replicated.

This is why it’s essential to have real-time insights from automated software, like Mediahawk. The software tracks detailed metrics in real-time – such as calls generated from a campaign – so you can continually adjust your campaigns based on the most relevant data.

Enables a deeper understanding of customer behaviour

Descriptive analytics in marketing provides valuable insights into customer behaviours, needs, preferences, and demographics. This deeper understanding allows you to effectively target your customer audience with more personalised marketing messages and improved customer experiences.

For example, you can analyse past phone call conversations using speech analytics software, to identify areas that need improvement in your customer interactions. You’ll be able to analyse transcripts of full conversations, as well as identify relevant spoken keywords that can indicate a customer’s satisfaction or intent to purchase.

Facilitates data-driven decision-making

One of the most significant benefits of descriptive analytics in marketing is the ability to support data-driven decision-making. The clear, factual information about past campaign performance removes much of the guesswork from marketing strategies.

You’ll have all the concrete data you need to confidently adjust your strategies for improved engagement, lead generation, and ROI. With every review of your strategies, use the real-time insights to see what has changed and how it impacts the direction of your marketing efforts.

Enhances reporting and communication

Descriptive marketing analytics produces the most effective visual representations of data, such as charts, graphs, and customisable dashboards. This makes it easier to break down complex information into actionable insights, so you can back up any marketing decisions.

This improved reporting also leads to better alignment across teams in your business and provides clearer evidence when you need approval for new marketing initiatives.

Examples of descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics in marketing can be applied in numerous ways. Here are some practical examples:

1. Valuable lead tracking: You’ll be able to track the most relevant data that goes beyond vanity metrics – such as simply monitoring traffic – to gather deeper insights into your most valuable leads. You’ll gain a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey to see how each touchpoint contributes towards a customer’s intent to purchase, so you can optimise your channels and campaigns accordingly.
2. Social media engagement: Descriptive analytics tracks the performance of your social media campaigns and channels, to see how they directly impact your website visits, calls, and sales. The right descriptive marketing analytics platform will be able to seamlessly integrate with different platforms, like Facebook, for example.
3. Customer segmentation: Descriptive analytics in marketing will group customers together based on various attributes like demographics, purchasing behaviour, engagement levels, and more. This segmentation leads to more effective campaign targeting and improved customer experiences.
4. Campaign performance tracking: Analyse metrics like conversion rates, visitor to call ratio, and ROI across different campaigns, to understand which strategies are most effective. Mediahawk’s Parameter Connect gives you a complete picture of your integrated campaigns, with seamless reporting on multiple datasets, automated analysis, and clarity on both online and offline campaigns. This will let you more accurately reshape your strategies for increased growth.
5. Call tracking and analysis: Advanced call tracking systems can provide descriptive analytics on inbound calls, including call volume, duration, and outcomes. This is particularly useful for businesses that rely heavily on phone interactions.
6. Sales performance analysis: Examine sales data over time to distinguish which marketing channels are responsible for the most sales. A platform like Mediahawk also reveals which channels generate the highest value sales as well as sales of specific products. This information is crucial for developing robust sales strategies and improving your marketing ROI.
7. Speech analytics: You’ll be able to analyse customer phone conversations, scan call transcripts, and identify relevant keywords mentioned in the conversation. You’ll gain key insights into common customer issues, frequent queries, purchasing patterns, and overall customer behaviour trends.

These examples demonstrate the versatility and importance of descriptive analytics in marketing, and how it should be applied across various aspects of your marketing efforts to gain valuable insights.

Drive better business decisions with descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics plays a crucial role in creating successful marketing strategies. You need a clear and comprehensive view of past performance in order to make the most informed decisions for your future campaigns.

You’ve seen the benefits of implementing descriptive analytics in marketing, and with software like Mediahawk, you can transform this data into actionable insights that drive growth. From improving campaign performance to optimising your resource allocation, descriptive marketing analytics software is among the most powerful components in the current marketing space.

Discover how descriptive analytics can transform your marketing. Request a demo with Mediahawk, to stay ahead of the curve, make smarter decisions, and achieve greater success in your strategies.