30 Marketing Pros & Data Analysts Reveal How Marketing Data Analysts Can Better Impact Marketing ROI

More companies are turning to marketing data analysis to gain better insights on their customers, deliver the right messages at the right time, and increase revenue through better marketing ROI. Marketing data analysts are tasked with making sense of raw data and gleaning actionable insights from a variety of tools and resources, from customer engagement and speech analytics to web and social media analytics.

In short, marketing analysts are often expected to predict the future, and, fortunately, tools like interaction analytics are available that can help them do just that. At the end of the day, companies are looking for better ROI from their marketing efforts, and marketing analysts are the experts with the chops to make it happen. So, how can marketing analysts make a bigger impact on marketing ROI? To find out, we reached out to a panel of marketing pros and data analysts and asked them to answer this question:

“How can marketing data analysts better impact marketing ROI?”

Read on to find out what our pros had to say about how marketing data analysts can make a bigger impact on marketing ROI.

Buzz Carter 

Buzz Carter is a Digital Marketer based out in Essex working for Bulldog Digital Media, he’s been heavily involved in the industry and has been recognized for his work being shortlisted for the Young Search Professional award at the 2018 European Search Awards and Rising Star at the 2017 Drum Search Awards.

“Analyzing marketing data is a great tool for…”

Increasing your ROI for a marketing campaign, especially in the digital marketing realm where you can look at the microdata, which ranges from click-through rates to on page engagement, time on a page, and your conversion rate on a webpage. This goes hand in hand with split testing, giving you the ability to isolate and test different elements on the site to make a page more effective at getting conversions.

These tie in perfectly to PPC (Pay Per Click) with the ability to select pages that perform well in terms of conversions, isolating these pages and pushing them with PPC. This way you get a high-performing page in front of your audience straight away and have a funnel set up to generate leads and conversions.

Filip Silobod

Filip Silobod is a Digital marketing & SEO specialist with four years of experience in digital marketing, especially in SEO. He has a lot of experience in digital marketing in the hospitality industry.

“Segmentation in Google Analytics is the best way to increase ROI…”

First, you have to find a segment of your website visitors that convert more than others. Look at the metric conversion rate. There is almost nothing you cannot segment via Google Analytics. Usually visitors on desktop convert more than on mobile. So, make a segment to include users that come to your site via desktop. Then you might find that you want to target certain age group, sex, or people who visited a certain page on your site to convert more. You can mix all those metrics in one segment and then target that segment with your ads. That way you will avoid spending on ads targeting people who fall outside of that lucrative segment.

Syed Irfan Ajma 

Syed Irfan Ajmal is the growth marketing manager at Ridester, a ridesharing blog which has grown to 650,000 visitors/month. He is also a columnist (Forbes, World Bank, HuffPo, SEMrush etc.), an international speaker, and a podcast show host. Ridester has been mentioned in several top publications including Entrepreneur, Inc, Forbes, Reader’s Digest, and all of its employees are millennials and Gen Z who work remotely.

“We work with a variety of marketing data analysis tools, and we have used them to positively impact ROI…”

Things that a marketing data analyst can do to get the same results would include:

1. Social Media: Review trends-related data provided by BuzzSumo to find stories which have a bigger chance of going viral.
2. Legally Spy on Competitors: Review backlinks for competitors using Ahrefs Link Inspector to find sites which have given backlinks to your clients but not your site, and then reach out to them to persuade them into giving you a link as well.

Example: For a client who was an auto care company, we did our analysis and found that one of their competitors had received links from car leasing and car insurance companies. We realized that they did it by giving a discount to these car leasing and car insurance companies’ clients. We did the same and that contributed to positively impacting our client’s ROI.

Jonas Sickler 

Jonas Sickler is the Marketing Director at ReputationManagement.com.

“Digital touchpoints leading to conversions are more like a game of Plinko than a defined path…”

The best way marketing data analysts can show ROI is to capture and accurately track every conceivable touchpoint. Customers may see ads on social media, prompting them to Google your brand which will result in organic traffic.

Since campaign parameters will only work on links, you’ll need to use another layer of tracking to capture the first interaction for organic and direct visits. If a customer sees your ad on Facebook and Googles your company later in the day, you’ll miss the Facebook touchpoint in Analytics.

Discount codes are an excellent way to solve this issue.

Justin Butlion 

Justin Butlion is an analytics specialist that helps businesses become more data-driven. He’s also the founder of ProjectBI, a blog and community for analysts and operations specialists.

“Marketing analysts impact marketing ROI in the following ways…”

Provide insights on existing campaigns: The classic way that marketing analysts help businesses improve their marketing ROI is by providing insights from data on the activities of the marketing department. This helps the team and executives better understand the performance of their activities. Once the company knows what’s working, decisions can be made on where the budget should be spent.

Provide reports that can help with quicker and better decision making: Marketing analysts can also build reports and dashboards in tools like Excel or Tableau which can be used by the marketing department. The marketers can use these reports to get up to date information on their campaigns and then make better and quicker decisions on where they should focus their energy.

Marketing managers can adjust their strategies and move quicker, thus improving the ROI of the department.

Help identify new ways to drive growth / revenue: Strong marketing analysts will be able to spot useful insights from the company’s data and share these with the marketing team. These ideas may result in very profitable channels for growth, which will in turn improve the ROI of the marketing department.

Help define KPIs: What gets measured gets managed. A marketing analyst can help managers and team leaders define their KPIs (key performance indicators). Well defined KPIs will bring order to a disorganized team or department and well keep individuals accountable. A team which uses KPIs correctly will perform better and therefore have a better ROI.

Bonus: I have written two posts at ProjectBI which give into examples of how marketing data can be used to improve performance. The first discusses email funnels, and the second is a post on how to track your content analytics.

Steve James

Steve James writes about marketing for small businesses on his blog, smallbizbigbiz. Steve has been running a small business marketing blog for the last 6 years.

“Any marketing specialist that can perform corporate outreach across a range of platforms also has the ability to…”

Record the success of their posts on the prospect community: Reach, Impressions, post open and bounce rates all tell stories – not only on individual messages, but the overall success rate of the entire marketing exercises.

Are your messages reaching your prospect audience, and what is the result of any message sent out? As a business owner, the return on investment is critical to find out where and what your audeince is.

Patrick Delehanty 

Patrick Delehanty is the Marketing Manager at Marcel Digital. Over the years, Patrick’s talents and efforts have landed him nods from USA Today, Inc., CIO, and Paste Magazine, as well as other media outlets.

“Data is everywhere…”

And while this constant influx may some like it will paint a clearer picture of your overall marketing performance, it can actually be quite difficult to decipher how your efforts are performing overall. In order to better attribute ROI to your marketing efforts, marketing data analysts must:

• Prioritize efforts
• Enable better website tracking
• Leverage attribution in analytics

When you’re able to better prioritize your marketing efforts, you’re better able to focus and hone in on the data that attributes best to the performance of those efforts – you eliminate the data noise. From there, you can implement better tracking on your website through Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to measure the performance of those now-prioritized marketing efforts, from incoming website traffic to the actions (or Events and goal tracking) they take on the website.

You’ll also want to leverage channel attribution in Google Analytics. Using this feature, you’ll be able to track what marketing channels are attributing most to direct or last click conversions, or assisting in conversions. This data will not only help you better understand how your efforts are performing to your most important business goals, but also help you see opportunities and where you should be utilizing budget most or least.

Dylan Yates 

Dylan Yates is an SEO & Search Specialist. He has consulted for Warner Music Group, Simply Business, and Photobox Group and was nominated for the 2018 Search Award for ‘Best Local Campaign’. Dylan provides retained SEO consultancy for VIP clients as well as manages an established Content Marketing and Digital PR service.

“Marketing analysts can better impact marketing ROI in a few ways…”

1. Build a Model to Quantify the Expected Outcomes: 

Value exists in quantifying the forecasted outcomes from your marketing investments. Learn what to measure, when to measure and how to measure. In order to achieve your goals, establish specific steps to move the process along.

At my agency we’ve found that most digital marketing teams desire every campaign measured, but less than a third can effectively place ROI at the channel level. Mapping the impact of your marketing campaign to results hardens your ability to prove value – you should be tracking impressions and conversions, but also less-easily identifiable metrics such as how the activity halos in to brand and builds a holistic marketing strategy.

2. Avoid Vanity Metrics: 

Avoid setting KPIs that don’t directly result in some form of conversion value, like for example measuring your ability to rank number one for keyword X. These metrics distract your team from the business goal.

3. Sales, Sales & More Sales: 

The Information Age has produced a new type of consumer – an informed buyer. People now make purchases based on blogs and review sites. The good news for your business is that you have access to the same information. The bad news: your team doesn’t know how to translate that data into revenue.

4. Experiment Frequently: 

A/B testing offers opportunities for your business to accelerate growth. Testing should not only offer insight, but also alternatives. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process; simple business experiments work well.

Try the test-and-learn approach. Take one action with one targeted group, take a different action (or no action) with a control group, and then compare the results. This method keeps the process simple, and outcomes become apparent without the hassle.

In SEO, very quickly you’ll see whether or not the results of your tests are yielding results.

5. Make a Decision Without Regret: 

Reporting your marketing analytics is necessary for your business’s success. More importantly, your team should focus on making an informed decision from those reports. So, what’s stopping management from taking action? They may have a case of analysis paralysis.

A study conducted by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists found that we are sometimes so obsessed with filling information gaps that we may choose the wrong path. Your business may want to create one more report or consult with one more business analyst. Our challenge is to make a good decision without accumulating more data.

Lauren Ackerman 

Lauren Ackerman is a Digital Strategist at J. Schmid.

“Marketing data analysts have a huge and important role in…”

Impacting ROI of future campaigns by providing the team with key insights. From the earliest planning stages, a marketing team should be armed with the knowledge of who the audience is and what has been successful in the past, either for this retailer or others. How does the target audience typically like to interact with brands (social, email, catalog)? What creative do they respond to? What offers tend to work well with this group? How many touches are needed before we start to see an impact?

Having this knowledge makes it easier for the marketing team to make informed decisions about allocating budget and effort from a strategic perspective. Using data to drive marketing decisions is absolutely critical to maximizing ROI, while the role of the marketing analyst is to take the massive amount of data available and get to the heart of what’s important to each brand and campaign.

Zach Watson  

Zach is the Director of Content at DePalma Studios, a UX design agency. Previously, he helped B2B technology companies develop content strategies and optimize their demand generation programs.

“In the B2B world, marketing’s biggest ROI is measured in sales opportunities…”

In order to have a bigger effect, data analysts need to focus on metrics that directly impact sales and hypothesize how to improve those numbers.

Take social, for example. Instead of focusing just on engagement, analysts should look at which content is generating the highest number of leads. Then examine how often those leads convert into opportunities.

By establishing baselines for lead generation and lead to opportunity rate, analysts are able to calculate which initiatives not only generate the highest number of leads, but also which campaigns produce the best leads.

With that knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to take a scientific approach and test new strategies based on what you know has been working well.

That’s only a start, but it’s the most important step to creating a measurable marketing funnel that allows you to forecast ROI.

Trifon Tsvetkov 

Trifon is Regiondo’s content manager and an experienced growth marketer in the SaaS space. When he’s not researching, outlining, writing or editing, he plays lots of chess and football.

“There are several ways marketing data analysts can better impact marketing ROI…”

To explain these, we first need to understand what drives marketing ROI. Namely, it’s the (potential) revenue achieved and the costs of achieving it.

We can thus impact marketing ROI by a) increasing the customer lifetime value (LTV) or b) decreasing the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC).

So how can marketing data analysts help increase LTV and decrease CAC? Given the nature of the role, we can look at the following ways:

1. Identify marketing assets that are not utilized to their full potential. This could be on a macro level (e.g. website) or it could be on a micro level (e.g. a landing page that underperforms compared to other similar pages). Improving these marketing assets can decrease the CAC by increasing conversion rates.
2. Identify customer segments and individual customers for which there is potential for upselling to higher value products and/or services. Knowledge of these can be triggered by changes in customer behavior such as increased activity. Example: a software company user might start logging in daily instead of weekly – this is a sign that they are more engaged and thus more likely to benefit from a potential upsell. This way, LTV is increased.
3. Identify customer segments or individual customers that are getting disengaged. This is the reverse of point 2) and a good example is a software user gradually decrease their activity. Spotting and addressing such drops can improve the customer retention rate and therefore increase LTV.
4. Identify opportunities for cheaper and/or more relevant traffic. Bringing in more of the same customers at a lower cost or bringing more relevant website visitors can help improve conversion rates and therefore reduce CAC.

In a nutshell, the key ways in which marketing data analysts can help improve marketing ROI is by identifying cost saving and/or revenue generation opportunities. These two areas are primarily affected by the following:

• marketing awareness (e.g. relevant web traffic);
• conversion rates (e.g. % of visitors who purchase/sign up);
• retention rates (e.g. how long people keep paying for a given product/service); and
• upsell values (e.g. customers paying more over time).

Ketan Kapoor 

Ketan Kapoor is the CEO & Co-Founder of Mettl.

“In my experience, marketing data analysts can make a landslide difference to the marketing ROI…”

Marketing data can help teams take strategic and informed decisions on what initiatives to undertake and what to drop. It’s marketing data only that tells you what product lines, geographies, or seasonalities to focus upon, if you are to carve the optimum ROI out of your marketing campaigns. Other than that, data can reflect the true potential of any marketing activity, which otherwise might be based on mere intuition and best practices followed by a particular industry. No matter what’s preached as a best practice, it’s better to have a data-validated approach to reveal the true picture before investing money, and that’s where marketing analysts are indispensable. Without marketing data, you only get a superficial picture and you might end up scratching the surface for years without yielding any significant returns.

They can offer you thought-provoking insights directly related to your business line and product, so that you can function beyond the umbrella of “proven best practices” to continue the innovation bandwagon. And the best part is, marketing data can be fruitful for both the digital and non-digital world. For instance, marketing data can tell whether a particular location would be suitable for billboard advertising depending on the buyer persona, expected footfall and other factors. Similarly, in the digital world, marketing data analysts can help you with details like what all traction and effects you can expect if you get a featured and mention in a leading publication or magazine.

Carlos Cruz 

Driven by his ambition to improve existing online marketing solutions, Carlos Cruz created Clicktool, a toolkit that provides online marketers with a one-stop shop to organize data, track campaigns, and conduct A/B experiments to discover the best marketing strategies.

“The data is always there, you just have to know how to read it…”

In fact, the ability to read your data is quickly becoming one of the key advantages a company can have over its competitors. This is allowing certain companies to quickly identify who their target audience really is, and where they are spending their time. This is how some companies breeze by the competition while others never seem to get ahead. In today’s world, knowing who your audience is, where your audience is and what’s the right message can all be a data driven decision. You just have to know how to interpret the information, and above all, experiment with your message until you get it right.

Sean McCaffrey 

Sean McCaffrey is the Marketing Operations Specialist at PrimePay. He’s a data-driven marketer with a passion for identifying key insights which companies can use to fill gaps in their strategic initiatives while enhancing the digital customer experience.

“With new technologies making large data sets easily digestible and…”

Tracking methods so readily available, why is it that so many companies still struggle to accurately show the impact of their marketing ROI? Often, it’s because they don’t have the right person behind the scenes working on managing their marketing analytics. A marketing data analyst can better prove the success of your team’s marketing efforts by ensuring that every campaign you run or page you launch is properly tagged, optimized, and ready to bring in more customers and sell more products.

For example: If you are an e-commerce store running a shopping campaign using Google’s product listing ads, it is imperative that your landing page is properly tagged with event triggers such as “Add to Cart” and that your purchase page has a dynamic conversion code to be able to accurately capture that a customer bought your product and how much money they spent. This information would then be available in your analytics platform where a data analyst could see granular information about each customer purchase and measure marketing’s return on investment.

Every company and industry will have a different way of measuring their ROI, but marketing data analysts should always make sure that no matter what, every campaign is properly tagged and made trackable utilizing the technologies they have at hand. This way, your team can have a better understanding of their impact to the bottom line and a clear view of what happens with every dollar they spend.

Cassie Gonzalez 

Cassie is the Brand and Community Manager at OnePitch where she handles everything from social media, to owned content, to public relations. She went to Colorado State University and studied Business Management with an emphasis in marketing. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, discovering new local food spots, and spending time with her family.

“By having a team member with a strong understanding of marketing data analytics…”

Business owners can determine which marketing practices to continue or adjust for optimal performance. This idea can be applied to all aspects of marketing from a paid, owned, and earned media perspective. If a particular tactic is costing the company more resources than what it’s returning, the marketer will have the data to back up their suggestion of discontinuing the practice. Alternatively, marketers can use this data to justify a need for increases in resources for methods which continuously perform well.

Natalie Athanasiadis 

Natalie Athanasiadis the Owner and Head of Growth at Ormi Media.

“When it comes to marketing data, what you don’t know can hurt you…”

Your marketing strategy should be tied to your ongoing findings and trends in the data. It’s how you can pick up changes in user behavior and how your site is resonating with your audience. The information about the consumer journey help keep businesses agile and help increase revenue.

Michael Rurup Andersen 

Michael Rurup Andersen has worked as a freelance digital marketing consultant since 2010 helping SMEs and enterprise brands use Big Data intelligently as a growth accelerator.

“To better impact marketing ROI, you need to…”

Use data like a scientist or an investigator. If you are not familiar with machine learning, then team up with an in-house resource who is, or find an external resource.

Going through large amounts of data takes a lot of time, but via predictive analysis done by machine learning, you can minimize time consumption, build scalable data analytics infrastructure, and eliminate human error (e.g. gut feeling), which in turn will impact your marketing ROI.

Examples of machine learning techniques:

Sending frequency – Finding the optimal time to send emails, what to include, and to whom based on the previous behavior. This will help to decrease unsubscribe rate, raise open rates and CTR, and in the end, increase conversion rates.

Content marketing ROI – More and more AI-driven MLSaaS’ focus on making it easy to create content personalized to specific segments of customers more or less on autopilot. This will help increase your customers’ perception of the value your brand creates, spurring a positive relation, which can lead to an increase in loyalty and Customer Life Value (CLV)

Customer CHURN – The quicker you can predict customer CHURN, the better you can prevent it. Predicting this and building a proactive strategy can increase CLV.

Computer vision – This will help brands in discovering and identifying when their names are mentioned, used in imagery and videos, related to product issues and even track sponsorship ROI.

Cristian Rennella 

Cristian Rennella is the CMO & CoFounder of MejorTrato.com.mx.

“Marketing data analysts can better impact your ROI when…

The work is done by more than one person. Unfortunately, in most companies, due to a budget limitation, there is only one data analyst manager; however, this makes his point of view, thought, and reflection just his.

When there are two or more people, the possibility opens up for dialogue and interaction in order to explore other paths, other ideas, and options to analyze information that was NOT previously taken into account.

If you want to enable your marketing data analysts to impact your ROI, I recommend that you hire a new data analyst employee, even if it is part-time. This allowed us to increase our ROI marketing by 13.4% (yes, awesome!).

Nate Masterson 

Nate Masterson is the CEO of Maple Holistics, a company dedicated to cruelty-free, natural, and sustainable personal care products.

“One example of game-changing analytics is A/B testing…”

A/B testing can help you pick the exact right layout design for every stage of the buying process to yield the greatest possible results. You can use this kind of analysis to figure out how to advertise and how your landing page should look. All of this helps you along the path of maximum profitability, which is, after all, the goal. Make no mistake: investing your time and money into data analytics will pay dividends.

Brandon Seymour 

Brandon Seymour is a marketing strategist with nearly ten years of SEO and digital marketing experience. He currently works as the SEO Manager for DentalPlans.com.

“The best goals and KPIs are of course…”

Those that are directly – or at least very closely – tied to revenue. In my experience, many marketers don’t know how to properly interpret and analyze their data. Marketing analytics can be very nuanced, and it’s important to understand which metrics mean the most for your particular business. For instance, most SEOs focus heavily on rankings and organic traffic. These metrics are helpful to benchmark progress in terms of online visibility and clickthrough rate, however, it doesn’t measure much in terms of value. A smarter approach would be focusing on the organic traffic and rankings that drive the most revenue. Then marketers can effectively boost their overall ROI.

Dean DeCarlo 

Dean DeCarlo is the President of Mission Disrupt.

“Marketing data analysts can better impact marketing ROI because they are…”

Able to help identify the exact areas where marketing is working and more importantly not working. Analysts that can pick up on these patterns can help turn around failing marketing campaigns and save companies literally millions of wasted advertising dollars.

Without the right analyst’s companies lose out on the potential to properly monitor campaign and maximize the results.

Jason Weddle 

Jason Weddle is the SEO / PPC Account Manager at CNG Digital Marketing. Currently enamored with all data tied to search marketing, Jason endeavors to apply his diverse range of experience in digital marketing to problem-solving for businesses of all sizes. Outside of the office, he enjoys spending time with his wife as well as rock climbing and backpacking

“Marketing data analysts need to be…”

Vocal in order to impact a business’s ROI. Having been tasked with measuring the results and setting goals for countless projects over the years, the thing wish I would have known earlier is that you need to make your input very clear; management and others can be quick to ignore hard numbers as they have a myriad of interests other than improving returns on investment, like optics and gut feelings. Don’t forget to document your input, too. If you know a project is dead on arrival based on marketing data and analysis, I suggest creating and sending a short report to make your position clear. If your data-driven approach isn’t welcome at your current job, save your case studies; they’ll be welcome when you’re interviewing for a better position with a smarter organization.

Sam Underwood 

Sam Underwood is the VP of Business Strategy with Futurety, an Ohio-based data analytics and marketing agency.

“Ten years ago, it was common for marketing content roles to outnumber analysts 10:1 in many agencies…”

Today, the script has flipped, and many forward-thinking organizations have many more analysts than they content creators or campaign specialists. The driving force behind this is a need to be better, rather than bigger; Google no longer prioritizes extended-length content like it once did, Facebook is aggressively throttling reach regardless of how much you post, and consumers are increasingly banner-blind and impatient with content that takes more than a few seconds to consume. There are significant advantages for organizations to create less but better-targeted content, to the right audience at the right time on the right channel.

Deborah Sweeney 

Deborah Sweeney is the CEO of MyCorporation.com.

“Growing the business with the right mix of marketing is also a continuous challenge…”

Evaluating ROI and making sure that you are profiting from marketing spend is always a challenge. It’s good to find the right balance between brand development, growth of revenue, and targeted marketing. Social marketing is not the secret to unlocking millions in revenue. Rather, it’s an inexpensive, useful way to connect with your customers and tap into new markets. Still, wanting to track ROI is understandable; just remember that there is no standard conversion, like every re-tweet gets you another dollar. Social marketing has less to do with direct sales, and more to do with increasing brand recognition and boosting SEO.

Ruben Ugarte 

Ruben Ugarte is the Founder of Practico Analytics.

“It is obvious that having better data will help you get a better ROI on your marketing campaigns, but it can also…”

Improve your decision-making abilities. Let’s imagine that you run a campaign that ends up with a successful outcome, like more sales using discounts. The short-term results might mean more sales (and customers), but the long-term impact could be poor retention rates if those customers weren’t the right fit. Data can objectively show these trends and impact the design of future campaigns.

Amy Bishop 

Amy has built and implemented multichannel digital strategies for a variety of companies of all sizes from start-ups and small businesses to Fortune 500 and global organizations spanning several industry verticals. Her expertise includes e-commerce, lead generation, and localized site-to-store strategies. Amy recently launched Cultivative, a performance marketing agency.

“Data analysis has a huge impact on marketing ROI…”

At the most basic level, data analysis can provide insight into whether a channel has a positive ROAS. For instance, if we know how many calls or form submits came from paid search and led to sales, then we have a sense of paid search profitability but it doesn’t tell us much in terms of how to improve performance. If we can dig deeper; to tie sales back to specific keywords or targeting tactics, then we can reallocate budgets, boost bids and prioritize top performers. These insights can have a huge impact on performance. The deeper that we can dig into the data, the more actionable that it becomes. We can also analyze the content that people showed interest in, the questions prospects had, and common objectives, to create content that responds to their needs before they even ask for it. These are just a few of the many, many ways that we can use data analyses to improve marketing ROI.

Stacy Caprio 

Stacy is the Founder, Google Adwords & SEO Consultant for Stacy for Startups.

“One thing marketing data analysts can do to impact marketing ROI is to…”

Make sure the data reporting is separated by acquisition channel and follows through to revenue. This allows them to separate their analysis to the point where they can see where each profitable lead comes from and how much each lead generates for the business. From there, the marketing team can focus on the more profitable lead channels and decrease investment in the least profitable to continue to grow ROI.

Gennady Litvin 

Gennady Litvin is an attorney at Moshes Law.

“Too many times the focus is on…”

Vanity metrics, especially when it comes to social media marketing. While likes and comments are great, the focus needs to be on the conversions. Are they coming to our website? Are they taking our offers? Those questions are more important to answer than how many likes we had on our last post or how many subscribers signed up yesterday to our email list. That being said, marketing analysts can better impact marketing ROI by filtering all the data through the lens of the campaign goal. Plan the ROI we want, create a budget to follow, experiment often, and work the numbers through the goal we set.

Jenna Erickson 

Jenna is a Chicago-based digital marketer, currently in a role as the Marketing Manager at Codal, a UX design & development agency. She is a forward-thinking, creative self-starter with a passion for technology, eCommerce, the Internet of Things, startups, and all compelling digital experiences.

“Data analysis can have a major impact return on investment…”

Gathering data is relatively easy with today’s software tools, but the analysis and decision-making that stems from it can be complex. Although it can be complex, data analytics in digital marketing can be effective when the data is properly understood and implemented.

By understanding your user’s journey, what they are looking for, what sources they come from, what pages they are visiting, and how long they are on them for, you can help your team make data-driven decisions on where you should be investing your marketing dollars.

By understanding big data, you can recognize what strategies are and are not working, and alter your marketing spend to better cater to your digital marketing plans.

In turn, if you can spend more of your budget in places that you know are working, your ROI can be higher than ever.

Shukti Sarma 

Shukti Sarma is a Content Specialist at BrandLoom Consulting.

“Good marketing data analysts are now vital for any company in the digital age…”

We all hear that “data is everything,” and the data analysts help companies make sense of the data, suggest improvements, and help shape a good digital marketing branding and strategy.

Marketing data analysts help execute the marketing strategy of a company, which is crucial for a company to achieve its ROI goals. These analysts also collect, analyze, and report on the data collected on the new or existing products/services the company is offering. In short, a marketing data analyst studies all the information about the market and the products her employer is selling, and interprets it for the company management so that they understand what exactly the market looks like, what the customers want, how the customers are responding to a product, and what decisions to make so that the company can improve revenue collection and its reputation in the market.

Any company’s ultimate goal is to get good returns on their investment. A marketing data analyst shows what are the areas in which a company can make improvements so that the customers respond better to their brand and products, and thereby increase their sales and revenue.

This is especially important for ecommerce companies – where the feedback is fast and the data is automatically collected. A marketing data analyst must look at how the buyers are engaging with the company on the internet – so she has to have good understanding of pay-per-click advertising, keyword research, search engine optimization, product positioning, and content optimization for e-commerce clients. A good data marketing analyst is one who quantifies the effectiveness of a (digital) marketing strategy and its different components. Without the information she provides, a company cannot make sound decisions about branding, production, marketing, and costs. They are crucial for mapping out an ROI strategy.