Is your marketing campaign’s ROI on target? Which marketing initiatives are yielding the best return on investment for your organization? Using marketing analytics, you can track, review, and analyze your current marketing campaign’s effectiveness. To gain the greatest benefit from marketing analytics, you must use an assortment of measurement techniques, assess your current capabilities and proactively work to fill the gaps and act upon what you learn about your strategy.

Varied Measurement Techniques

To gain the most benefit from your marketing analytics efforts, work to utilize a variety of measurement techniques, including those that measure past activities, those that measure current activities and those that help predict future successes. As you evaluate analytics, consider whether the metrics will help you to answer the following questions:

• Which marketing campaign elements generated the greatest revenues year over year?
• How many leads were generated from each marketing technique? Ideally, the marketing analytics dashboard will separate results by type of campaign (i.e. email marketing, social media, mobile marketing).
• How are our current customers engaging with our brand? Which marketing channels are currently preferred? And, what are people saying online about our brand?
• Where should we target future marketing efforts in order to gain the greatest return on investment?

Assess Capabilities and Fill Gaps

Where do you stand in terms of results with your current marketing efforts? It is important to understand where you stand in terms of results measured against plan so that you can identify gaps and begin to develop a proactive strategy for bridging those gaps moving forward. As you review analytics, create a list of gaps in order of greatest importance to begin addressing. A strong marketing analytics program will not only provide metrics data about your current levels of success, but will enable you to select specific time frames in which to review (i.e. current quarter, previous quarter, semi-annually, current year over prior year).

Take Action

Many businesses fail to take corrective action utilizing the marketing analytics information provided by their metrics program. Collecting marketing analytics does a business little good unless the information is put to use. Testing and evaluating the results from your marketing programs tells you what is working and what isn’t; what needs to change and what programs you should continue.

Schedule recurring times in your calendar to review the information and results provided by your marketing analytics platform. Assess what is working and what seems to need improvement. Of the areas that require improvement, narrow your focus onto the areas of most importance (i.e. those that stand the opportunity to provide the greatest ROI). Develop changes to those marketing initiatives and schedule when you intend to relaunch. Repeat this process at least 4 times per year.

By utilizing varied measurement techniques, assessing and acting on current gaps and focusing on modifying your marketing techniques, you will be taking proactive steps toward maximizing your marketing program’s ROI.