Sometimes people are confused about what an analytics consulting agency does.
A lot of times, analytics is just included as part of a marketing campaign or a website build. Often it gets setup in the background while all the other activities are happening. However, this can lead to narrow results and limited perspectives on what success means. While there is definitely a place for that kind of analytics, it is not everything. In this blog post, I will explain some of the differences between the various types of analytics services you can get from an analytics service agency like DATACRAFT.
Marketing analytics is the process of measuring, analyzing, and optimizing the performance of your marketing campaigns and activities. It helps you understand how your marketing efforts are contributing to your business goals and how you can improve them.
However, not all marketing analytics services are the same. Depending on your needs and objectives, you may require different types of marketing analytics consulting services. In this post, I will explain the four main types of marketing analytics services and how they can help you achieve your marketing goals.
Why is marketing analytics important in the first place? Marketing analytics is important because it helps you measure and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By collecting, analyzing, and reporting data from various sources and platforms, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience, your marketing channels, your campaign performance, and your business outcomes. You can also use marketing analytics to test and optimize your marketing strategies, tactics, and creatives. Marketing analytics enables you to make data-driven decisions that can enhance your customer experience, increase your brand awareness, generate more leads, and boost your revenue and ROI.
1. Basic Analytics Support
Basic analytics support is the most basic type of marketing analytics consulting service. It typically involves helping a business to set up and implement a single analytics platform or channel, such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. A basic analytics support consultant can help a business to understand the data that is being collected and to identify key trends and insights.
Basic analytics support is suitable for businesses that have a simple and straightforward marketing strategy and only use one platform or channel for their marketing activities. For example, if you only run email campaigns to promote your products or services, you may only need basic analytics support to monitor and optimize your email performance.
2. Analytics Coordination
Analytics coordination is the next level of marketing analytics service. It involves ensuring alignment and consistency between multiple platforms or channels for your marketing analytics, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc.
Analytics coordination services help businesses to align their analytics data across multiple platforms and channels. This is important because it ensures that the data is consistent and comparable, and it makes it easier to identify trends and insights. An analytics coordination consultant can help a business to develop a data management plan, to integrate their analytics platforms, and can set you up to create reports that provide a holistic view of your marketing performance.
Analytics coordination is suitable for businesses that have a more complex and diverse marketing strategy and use multiple platforms or channels for their marketing activities. For example, if you run both paid and organic campaigns on different social media platforms to reach your target audience, you may need analytics coordination to ensure that you are measuring and reporting your results consistently and accurately.
3. Analytics Strategy (aka Measurement Strategy)
Analytics strategy is a higher level of marketing analytics service. It involves providing a comprehensive and strategic plan for your marketing analytics, including defining your business objectives, identifying your key stakeholders, mapping out your customer journey, selecting your data sources and tools, designing your dashboards and reports, creating a process for sharing insights with stakeholders, setting up your experiments and tests, etc. An analytics strategy consultant can help a business to develop an analytics roadmap and to implement the necessary processes and technologies.
One critically important aspect of strategy that is often overlooked is that analytics strategy helps you create a common language for performance, which makes collaboration with your internal and external partners easier. Miscommunication and misunderstandings are very common in analytics because of the varying levels of analytics maturity among stakeholders. The strategy can help correct that by clearly spelling out the shared framework everyone is participating in.
Analytics strategy is suitable for businesses that have a more ambitious and sophisticated marketing strategy and want to leverage their data to gain a competitive edge in their market. For example, if you want to use advanced techniques such as predictive modeling, machine learning, or artificial intelligence to optimize your marketing campaigns and customer experience, you may need analytics strategy to guide you through the process.
4. Cross-Channel Dashboards and Integrated Datasets
Cross-channel dashboards and datasets services help businesses to create a single source of truth for their marketing performance. This involves developing dashboards that provide a holistic view of marketing data from multiple platforms and channels. It also involves developing datasets that can be used to power analytics and machine learning applications.
Cross-channel dashboards help you visualize and understand your data in an easy and intuitive way. They also help you monitor and evaluate your progress towards your goals and identify any opportunities or challenges in your marketing activities. They also help you share and present your insights and recommendations to your stakeholders and decision-makers.
Integrated marketing datasets provide the unified back end that dashboards need to be complete and informative. These data sets can pull together many different platforms, campaign data, customer info, and business data into a single source of truth that can be leveraged in many ways. These data sets are normally built with enterprise-level data warehouses and reporting servers that use advanced data modeling tools and techniques.
This level of analytics is suitable for any business that wants to have a complete and holistic view of their marketing performance across all platforms or channels, however it is most common for complex marketing programs. For example, if you want to see how your social media campaigns are impacting your brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty, you may need dedicated analytics infrastructure to bring all the data together and show you the big picture.
What's Right For You?
Marketing analytics is an essential part of any successful marketing program. However, depending on your needs and objectives, you may require different types of marketing analytics consulting services. If you are new to marketing analytics, you may want to start with basic analytics support or analytics coordination services. As you become more sophisticated in your marketing analytics, you may want to consider analytics strategy or cross-channel dashboards and datasets services.
At DATACRAFT, we offer all four types of marketing analytics services to help you achieve your marketing goals. Whether you need basic analytics support, analytics coordination, analytics strategy, or integrated dashboards, we have the expertise and experience to help you.
If you want to learn more about our marketing analytics services or request a free consultation, please contact us today. We would love to hear from you!