Marketing Analytics
We decided to dedicate a portion of our website to a specific application of Business Analytics on the precise and trending field of business that is marketing. This business application is called Marketing Analytics.
First, what is really marketing? According to the dictionary, marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Also, according to the American Marketing Association's board of directors, marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
In both definition we actually see common and repetitive ideas and themes like selling, advertising, communicating and exchanging values.
Now, what is business analytics? Business analytics, as we studied throughout the semester, is the intersection of business and data science. It is the activity of studying data through the use of various tools and techniques. These different tools and techniques can be the use of predictive models, optimization techniques, linear and non-linear regression. Overall we can say that Marketing analytics and Business analytics are similar in the fact that both involve the efficient and clear communication of the different results to customers, businesses, and partners so that they can take the right decisions to enhance business operations.
Therefore Marketing analytics is the marketing application of Business Analytics. It is a crucial business part of Business Analytics. In most businesses, spending in this specific area increased by close to 60% between 2014 and 2015. The goal of marketing analytics is to generate insight from data to justify marketing decision and costs. It is important to understand that through technological advances, we are able to collect more and more data about consumers and their habits.
Marketing Analytics can be especially challenging because firms have to select properly the data they wish to analyze as they do not want to confuse their work teams, and they do not want to waste time, money nor any other important resources analyzing irrelevant data. We thus need to select what data is relevant, and then we need to process and analyze it in order to understand what to do to increase sales, brand awareness, brand value or the efficiency of the different messages developed internally. It is also useful in understanding how well those messages succeeded in reaching the different target markets. The most important goal in Marketing Analytics is to unlock the potential of marketing data, this is one of the most important resource of today’s firms.
Of course Marketing Analytics also interferes with and improves the efficiency of different commercial and corporate websites and their numerous implications concerning social Media, integrated online marketing campaigns and online communication. Marketing analytics efforts could be translated by the analysis of customer’s clicks, number of pages viewed and consulted, (how many times, and how long)
To conclude, understanding the very important field of Marketing Analytics is crucial for all firms in today’s world. Marketing Analytics can bring very unique competitive advantages that can bring massive amounts of market share to your company, and an important gain in brand awareness. Lastly and more importantly, it can also help you to set the right price or budget to maximize sales and profit.
Sources:
- http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/marketing-analytics-vs-business-analytics
- http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/marketing.html