8 Surprising Ways Business Analytics Helps Marketing Professionals

The reel and real world both run on data. Successful businesses and processes have business analytics at their very core. With the help of analytics, many professionals can benefit in their respective domains and attain professional as well as organisational objectives, which helps them grow.

One such profession is marketing. There are 3 Cs important in marketing, consumers, content, and conversion. Each of these 3 Cs is majorly evaluated by numbers, with measurable inputs, insights, and results. Such quantitative analysis helps marketing professionals and strategists with accurate data and effective outcomes.

By bringing business analytics to deal with the data gathered, marketing professionals can make more informed decisions about enhancing customer experience, product development, and services provision. Business analytics empowers marketing professionals, and organisations at large, to make data-driven decisions which provide substantial results.

Marketing and business analytics work hand-in-hand to create revolutionary differences for businesses, which help them stand out in the competition and succeed in their fields. Here’s the many ways business analytics benefits marketing professionals, and how you can be one too – with IMS Proschool!

8 Applications Of Business Analytics In Marketing To Make A Difference

Business analytics has transformed the way businesses approach marketing. With the power of data, marketers can identify patterns, trends, and design solutions that are well informed and yield significant results. From understanding the audience to curating marketing campaigns that are designed for the user, business analytics can determine significant factors that shape up the marketing industry.

Understanding Users

Business analytics provides valuable insights into the behaviours, preferences, and motivations of the users. Such in-depth knowledge of the users helps marketers gain a profound understanding of their audience, and design their strategies accordingly. By understanding their users better, marketers can churn out content and strategies that continually meet the evolving needs of the users.

1. Customer segmentation

Marketers can leverage business analytics to analyse customer data, and segment their audience into distinguished groups based on preferences, demographics, etc. Such segmentation becomes a lot easier with analytics, and allows for targeted marketing campaigns that resonate, relate, and engage with specific groups of users and increase conversion rates.

2. Customer journey mapping

Business analytics can help marketers gain accurate data from tools like Google Analytics and Semrush, among others, which gathers website traffic data. These tools help identify key touchpoints on websites, social media platforms, the time spent, and some common touchpoints. With a thorough quantitative analysis of their efforts, marketers can create tailored user journeys and optimise experiences.

3. Forecasting behaviours and preferences

Predictive analytics is one out of four types of business analytics. It uses historical data to analyse patterns and trends, and interpret future user behaviour and preferences. By using predictive analytics with customer segmentation, marketers can understand user behaviour and preferences and anticipate how they will evolve with time. This will further help develop new strategies and solutions based on the interpreted data.

Also Read – 6 Steps in the Business Analytics Process | Explained In The Easiest Manner

Creative Marketing

The scope of creative marketing increases manifolds with business analytics. We just saw the understood ways to know our users, their behaviours and preferences. With such data and innovative tools, marketers can leverage the art of storytelling to share data. The right knowledge of pain points, what works, what doesn’t work, together can help curate creative marketing strategies that hit the right spot.

4. Data-driven storytelling

Transforming the science and weight of data analysis into lighter, better narratives is the art of data-driven storytelling. Marketers use data to curate stories that resonate with the audience, evoke the desired emotions, and drive them towards action. It’s an efficient way of presenting data, telling stories, and driving engagement that can boost sales and brand loyalty.

5. Personalised experiences

“More the merrier” makes perfect sense for marketers, especially in this context. The more data they have in place, the more personalised experiences they can create and the more users they can resonate with. By analysing large amounts of data, behaviours, preferences, and needs can be categorised in order to push tailored product recommendations, customer interactions, and more.

Want To Learn Business Analytics In Just 2.5 Months?

Marketing Campaigns

The most crucial part of marketing is running campaigns. Be it email marketing campaigns or social media campaigns, all these efforts are quantifiable. Measuring the impact of every campaign helps understand the intensity of the effort, and compare it with the outcome. Such analytical data brings many insights from the current marketing campaigns and also sets a strong learning foundation for the next.

6. A/B testing

Marketing professionals can leverage several business analytics tools to conduct A/B testing, on a small scale as well as at a larger scale. From testing an email subject line to comparing website layouts, A/B testing churns out quick results and determines the better performer among the alternatives. This makes marketing elements immediately more effective and optimal for the users.

7. Real-time analytics

Marketing is a lot about performance. Thanks to analytics, marketers can take it up a notch by using real-time analytics tools that provide up-to-the-minute data on website traffic, customer behaviour, campaign performance, etc. A quick response from such tools enables marketers to identify and rectify any issues and make quick adjustments to their strategies.

8. Measuring ROI

Identifying key performance indicators and reviewing relevant metrics to measure performance is a crucial part of the process. From conversion rates to customer acquisition costs, every marketing effort brings results – some of which can be measured. By evaluating the return of investment (ROI) in any campaign or task, marketers can analyse efforts and prioritise tasks accordingly.

Also Read – 4 Types Of Business Analytics: It’s Time To Make Data Work

5 Emerging Trends in Marketing Analytics

The field of marketing has something new every day. Amid its constant evolution, many technological advancements and changing consumer behaviours have also been highlighted. These set the blueprint of where marketing analytics is heading, and it surely sounds promising:

1. Data and Privacy

While there’s always a set privacy policy in place, it often takes second place in the process of analysing large amounts of data. User data and privacy need to be maintained properly by implementing privacy-compliant collection and analysis practices. Customer data is valuable, and thus, needs thorough protection throughout the process.

2. Voice Search/Commerce Analytics

With more personalised and advanced shopping experiences, voice search has received good acceptance by most users. Such voice-based purchases can be tracked to see their impact on sales. Voice assistants, too, can prove to be very helpful in navigating a website or an app. Voice-driven strategies help make the platform a lot more accessible and reachable.

3. Integration of AI and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence has sneaked its ways and methods in most of our tasks, and has helped complete them more efficiently. Its wide range of capacities can be used to optimise several processes, for example, to automate data analytics, predict future trends and change in customer behaviour, etc. Together, AI and machine learning can change the marketing landscape to a great extent.

4. Cross-channel Analytics

Since marketing efforts are often scattered across various channels and platforms, it is necessary to evaluate each one individually. Cross-channel analytics takes it a step ahead and helps provide a more holistic view of certain metrics, like user behaviour, by integrating data from multiple channels. Such data can help curate and deliver more personalised and consistent strategies across all channels.

5. Ethical and Bias-free

While leveraging artificial intelligence, it is equally significant to analyse and ensure that the AI algorithms are free from bias. The use of AI should become more ethical, responsible, and transparent. This focus on protecting the use of AI and ensuring its ethical use will make marketers, brands, and users at large more aware of the advantages and shortcomings of AI, and how to optimise its use to its best capacity.

Also Read – Here’s your 5 step roadmap to Master Business Analytics

3 Best Examples of Business Analytics in Marketing

We see many examples of business analytics in action, all around us. To help your understanding of the huge scope of business analytics in the field of marketing, here are a few examples of brands that might ring a bell, which have leveraged business analytics and have observed sustainable growth:

PepsiCo’s Targeted Marketing

In this article by Harvard Business School, it highlights the crucial role of business analytics for PepsiCo in consumer-centric marketing. PepsiCo, a parent company to many different types of products across different countries, all around the US. To ensure full and timely availability of products, PepsiCo used predictive analytics on an in-house platform called Pep Worx. This platform analysed a dataset of 110 million households, to understand the demand for PepsiCo brand and product in each region.

With the resulting data, PepsiCo pushed those particular products in larger quantities where there was a higher demand. Gradually, the chosen product showed significant growth of product sales soon after this launch. Such data-driven decision making drove an 80% growth for PepsiCo’s Quaker Overnight Oats, just overnight!

Netflix’s Personalised Recommendations

A leader in the entertainment industry, Netflix serves its millions of users correctly by providing personalised recommendations. It collects several data points by analysing user viewing history, search behaviour, and ratings, to understand user’s preferences. Netflix then leverages this data to suggest more movies and TV shows – each tailored to the user’s taste.

Sources suggest that this recommendation system is a major contributor in the content streamed by users, helping Netflix with a whopping $1 billion revenue in customer retention. By paying attention to the users, Netflix has set the benchmark for good personalised service provision!

Amazon’s Dynamic Pricing

In the e-commerce industry, Amazon distinguishes itself with constant improvements and advanced features. With the use of real-time analytics, Amazon monitors competitor prices, demand fluctuations, inventory levels, etc., and adjusts the pricing strategy accordingly. This helps the brand maximise profits and optimise revenue, while also staying ahead in the competition.

With this practice, Amazon has managed to capture a large share of the e-commerce market, and continues to provide better experiences for its users.

Also Read – Want a job in Business Analytics? Read top 6 job profiles & salaries

How To Create A Career in Marketing Analytics

Business analytics goes hand in hand with marketing, especially because like business analytics, marketing also runs on numbers. By bringing the art of marketing together with the science of data analytics, professionals can make more informed decisions that drive growth and success for the organisation.

Key responsibilities of a marketing analyst include data collection, data cleaning, data analysis and interpretation, communicating insights, and curating marketing strategies based on the data analysis. It also includes making use of predictive models to forecast future trends, as well as optimising marketing strategies with A/B testing.

With strong analytical skills, knowledge of marketing technologies, data analysis tools, and communication skills, one can excel in the field of marketing analytics.

Also Read – Top 8 Tools Every Business Analyst Should Use To Solve Problems

How to Excel Business Analytics with IMS Proschool

1. Build a strong foundation by learning the most crucial skill: problem-solving.
2. Easily upgrade your course to domain-specific analytics, in this case, marketing, and specialise in your preferred field of analytics.
3. Coders as well as non-coders can take up this course.
4. The program extensively covers business analytics tools high in demand, including Excel, SQL, Tableau, Power BI & Python.
5. Learn by solving 15+ case studies and projects to increase your on-field understanding of business analytics.
6. Excel the program and become job ready in less than 3 months.
7. Explore 800+ job opportunities in more than 30 companies, to find the role that fits you best.
8. Ranked among the top 10 analytics institutes in India, IMS Proschool continues to be the reputed choice of institution for those aiming to pursue business analytics.

FAQs

1. What is business analytics in marketing?

In marketing, the role of business analytics is to collect, analyse, interpret, and extract insights to improve marketing performance and decisions. It majorly involves using statistical tools and predictive analytics to gain insights into customer behaviour, market trends, effectiveness of campaigns, etc.

2. What is the purpose of marketing analytics?

The ultimate goal of marketing analytics is to analyse marketing efforts and optimise them to achieve set business goals. With data-driven insights, marketing professionals can make more informed decisions, improve marketing performance, and better the overall ROI of marketing efforts.

3. Can I become a business analyst with a marketing degree?

Yes, definitely! A marketing degree sets a wonderful foundation for a career in business analytics. In fact, a proper understanding of marketing can come in handy as a business analyst, since it gives you good insights in user behaviour, data analysis, as well as problem solving.

4. Where is business analytics applicable, apart from marketing?

The versatility of business analytics helps it shine in many fields beyond marketing. It creates a huge difference in other industries such as finance, human resources, operations, supply chain optimisation, healthcare, etc.

Also Read – A detailed review of the many applications of business analytics!

Conclusion

The many similarities between business analytics and marketing make the entire collaboration seem effortless. Optimal utilisation of marketing analytics can help achieve business goals, maximise profits, and increase brand affinity within the users. Together, all marketing analytics efforts provide qualitative and quantitative results – if done right!