4 Marketing Analytics Tools That Are Shaping the Industry

Few marketers would admit to having “an excellent
handle” on their analytics. But don’t blame it on the
marketer.
Often marketing efforts are, by nature, hard to quantify in
terms of dollars, revenue or impact. They tend to result
in ghosts of impressions or whiffs of perception changes
-- or what we like to call “brand sentiment” -- more than
dollar signs.
But vague sentiment isn’t going to cut it for much
longer.
CEOs are increasingly demanding more tangible and
quantifiable metrics. In fact, in 2014 six in 10
professionals reported rising pressure from upper
management to be more data-driven, with marketers
feeling a majority of the heat.
As a result of rising demand, there’s been a swift
emergence of tools, technologies and “scores” in the
past year designed to help marketers measure their
impact.
Of the roughly $6.2 billion in deals in the marketing
technology space that have occurred within the past four
months, more than two-thirds come from funding,
acquisitions, or mergers of businesses relating to
intelligence and data.
Related: This Startup Wants to Revolutionize Search,
One Data Set at a Time
Andreessen Horowitz has recognized the trend, too, and
recently announced a $65 million round of funding for
Mixpanel, a Silicon Valley Web analytics company.
These investors are ready for an avalanche of cash and
contracts. And rightly so. The Wall Street Journal reported
spending on marketing analytics is expected to nearly
double over the next two years, from 7 percent to 12
percent, as marketers supersede CTOs as a business’s
biggest IT spender.
However, because the industry is still rather nascent, the
sheer number of companies and technologies flaunting
their business intelligence solutions can inundate the
digital marketer looking to implement a technology.
Despite the feverish efforts to invest in marketing
analytics, the lay-marketer is still struggling to get a
grasp on which metrics to track.
They’re searching for answers to their questions, like:
Which analytics should you track?
How do technologies differ?
What’s available on the market?
How do these technologies integrate with my
current marketing technologies?
To help sort through the chaos, here’s a quick look at
the some of the most powerful tools in marketing
analytics.
Measuring the effectiveness of your
website
Marketing analytics start where anything starts: at the
beginning, at the foundation. A proper marketing
operation ready to track revenue impact contains four
elements: a solid marketing automation software, a
robust CRM system, a content marketing production
space and a web presence tracking tool like Mixpanel .
Related: For Your Marketing Efforts to Succeed, You
Need to Overcome These 3 Hurdles
Mixpanel tracks comprehensive user behavior to give
companies a detailed look into what users are doing on
web and mobile properties, or how much time they are
spending within an application. The data, which can be
sliced, diced or julienned to a business’s liking,
illuminates interesting patterns like: How and where web
users congregate, which buttons get pushed most
frequently or usage rates for certain features.
The data is also extremely powerful for marketers. By
using multifactor analysis, for instance, you could
compare retention rates for users based on the
marketing campaign that “brought them in” to see which
ones resulted in the most valuable long-term customers.
Measuring the impact of your content
marketing
The next step is to use technology to tie revenue
to individual pieces of content. Kapost’s Content
Scoring can help with this task. (Disclosure, I work for
this company.)
Content Scoring takes a granular look at the effects of
singular marketing deliverables to revenue. It could tell
you, for example, the amount of revenue a single tweet
or blog post contributed to the business as a whole.
The process uses marketing automation and CRM data
to track successful customer “journeys” to identify the
various content pieces they interacted with before
committing to a purchase. It then attributes a relative
percentage of the total revenue driven by that customer
to the individual pieces of content (think: blog posts,
whitepapers, eBooks, and social media posts).
In this way people can look at what singular component,
or asset “type” is really resonating with audiences.
Related: A Data-Driven Reality Check for
Your Marketing
Marketing ROI planning
Don’t forget to plan your reporting.
Marketing Evolution is an example of technology that
helps marketers create ROI plans while leveraging big
data.
“Big data creates a smog of numbers, and knowing how
to tap into the right big data will define the differences
between businesses that excel and businesses that
choke,” says Rex Briggs, a bestselling author and
founder of Marketing Evolution.“Big data is actually the
confluence of three forces: real-time data, big data, and
automation. Taken together, the change is the ability to
discover, in real-time, which messages are working best
with which people, in which context, in which media, and
optimize accordingly.”
Predictive lead scoring and
predictive conversion rates
The most nascent -- but arguably the most powerful --
marketing analytics tool is predictive modeling .
Predictive modeling takes conventional data kept by
marketers and CMOs, compiles it and crunches it to
reveal patterns that confidently predict future buyer
behavior. Predictive analytics allow marketers to more
concretely assess what messages or content they
should be creating in order to optimize their revenue
potential.
Lattice Engines is a great example. one of the best
examples. Used by VMWare, DocuSign, and PayPal,
Lattice Engines delivers predictive apps that help
marketers cut the production of crap and focus on the
money makers.
“(Our clients) are looking for ways to identify the
likelihood of future events and determine the best course
of action based on that information,” says Amanda
Maksymiw, a content marketing manager at Lattice
Engines. “At a time when marketing is being measured
more directly against top-line revenues, it’s critical to
predict what prospects are likely to do next.”