Using Market Analytics to Hit Your Company Goals

Marketing has evolved at a breathtaking pace in recent years, as technology has enabled it to reach virtually limitless audiences – either large, broad targets or smaller, specific ones as needed. Don’t leave your valuable company data sitting on a server. Effective market analytics enables you to convert it to improved results and increased revenue.

You need a creative market analysis strategy and a platform that makes it easier to build brand awareness and reach customers at the right time. Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, market analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends.

How can you most effectively apply market analytics to your 2015 business goals?

Incorporate Big Data into Your Marketing

Market analytics in conjunction with Big Data can help you to properly evaluate your company’s marketing performance, gain insight into clients’ purchasing patterns and make evidence-based decisions. You can:

• Make your product more customer and market driven.
• Drive more qualified leads to your sales team.
• Work with your product development experts to ensure they’re delivering whatt clients want.

With Big Data, you can leverage existing information that’s available to you internally, along with external material from third-party vendors. This enables you to track marketing effectiveness with strategies including:

• Sentiment analysis.
• Soft surveillance and consumer behavior tracking.
• Open communication channels with customers.
• Inventory level monitoring to ensure product availability.
• Response to value-added services based on client profiles.

Your marketing department should engage your IT leadership to help them accomplish these goals. CIOs can help create strategy-building data that’s available internally, at your fingertips.

Where to Start – Or Improve

Nearly 75 percent of the entire North American population is now online – and inbound marketing is rapidly changing the way companies compete and reach out to this huge market. As leads search out information, engage with you on social media and access your website content, they leave behind a rich train of market intelligence.

It doesn’t end there. Sales and marketing platforms can easily be integrated for a closed-loop approach to comprehensive market analytics.

• The power of digital marketing is in its measurability. Thanks to inbound software, your marketing team can easily measure every aspect of their efforts on a lead-by-lead basis.
• However, measurement is only half the story. The other half is attribution. This means understanding how to allocate credit to your various marketing activities and recognize their impact. What sets market analytics apart from other business analytics is its focus on real-time market feedback. It goes beyond measuring strictly online performance and takes a more comprehensive approach – connecting all areas of marketing, including offline efforts. In doing so, it reveals the direct impact marketing has on pipeline generation and revenue growth.

Market analytics can be:

• Descriptive: Examples include past marketing investments, the dollar value of pipeline contributions, channel ROI and the number of people who enter your sales funnel.
• Predictive: This may encompass a number of actual conversations, social media sentiment scores, or forecasts of leads that convert to customers.
• Prescriptive: These are recommendations for future actions, such as reallocations of marketing spend, marketing mix optimization and optimization of social media scheduling.

Leverage Market Analytics to Drive Business Decisions

Market analytics lean on business data from other departments, primarily sales, and provide key feedback on the downstream impact of your efforts. You can use market analytics to:

• Optimize your lead generation activities. Measure how a lead found your website and which actions moved them through the customer lifecycle.
• Learn from real customer feedback. Thanks to social media, marketers can measure consumer satisfaction in real time using sentiment analysis. This helps identify trends in industry conversations and pinpoint leads and customers seeking help.

Would you like to learn more about market analytics and other trends to keep your business in the forefront of today’s competitive global marketplace? Consider partnering with the BrainWorks team. Gain resources, business intelligence and knowledge from experts who are passionate about your success. Read our related posts or contact us today.