A robust and reliable analytics platform is central to the success of your business. Analytics will help you generate more customers, increase sales, gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, create detailed customer profiles, measure return on investment (ROI) and maximize those valuable marketing dollars.
Surprisingly, though, most businesses are still in the dark when it comes to using analytics for business growth purposes and measuring ROI. For example, a CMO Council survey of senior marketing executives found that "more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI," as reported by the Harvard Business Review.
What Is Marketing Analytics?
Every business is different, which means marketing analytics will mean something slightly different to each of them. That said, WordStream provides a rather useful definition:
"Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and minimize wasted web marketing dollars."
Analytics Is Growing and Changing
According to a recent MarketsandMarkets™ market research report, the WiFi analytics market size is expected to grow from USD 5.3 billion in 2019 to USD 16.8 billion by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate of 26.0% during the forecast period.
Like everything else in marketing, best practices for effectively leveraging analytics is changing, in part because of new technologies and new data sources that continue to flood the market.
Innovative marketers are experimenting with multiple new approaches, but 4 trends are most likely to be dominant in 2019.
Until recently, marketing decisions were primarily informed by an analytics approach which relied on large, centralized data warehouses. Increasingly, marketers are turning to so-called "mini" data warehouses to augment and enhance their understanding of customer behavior.
That means effectively juggling and integrating data from traditional sources, as well as these new ones, including everything from Google Analytics to CRM tools, email service providers, social media sites (especially Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), SEO platforms, chat applications and WiFi marketing solutions.
It also means that marketers, in addition to analyzing data, must find those new sources which are most useful to their businesses. Doing so will help them make more informed decisions, enhance customer experience, push customer interest and drive down costs.
A principal reason for the success of ecommerce businesses is their ability to collect data about their online shoppers. Brick-and-mortar stores, lacking this capability, have found it very difficult to effectively compete. However, with the rise of WiFi analytics, this is no longer the case.
Simply explained, most consumers carry some sort of WiFi-enabled device, like a smartphone. These devices send out signals as they attempt to discover wireless networks in the surrounding area. Using WiFi sensors, brick-and-mortar stores can use those signals to gain valuable data insights about in-store customers, such as how long they stayed there, what time they visited, and whether they are a first-time or repeat customer.
Collected data can then be organized to better understand customer behavior, and to make operations and marketing decisions which best accommodate that behavior. WiFi marketing and analytics platforms essentially level the playing field, allowing brick-and-mortar locations to more easily and accurately measure marketing ROI, and to more effectively compete with online stores.
The speed with which data enters businesses is accelerating, making it increasingly difficult for human beings to effectively process it. For this reason, more businesses are utilizing analytics programs which include an artificial intelligence (AI) capability.
When effectively leveraged, these new systems rapidly identify customer data patterns and trends to provide guidance on best approaches to performance optimization. With behavior data captured from a WiFi analytics platform, things like customer lifetime value and customer churn rate can be identified.
In the past, analysts were expected to crunch numbers and generate reports, but little more. The problem has been that decision makers, often lacking experience in some of the more obscure concepts which inform analyses, haven't sufficiently understood what those reports were telling them.
Increasingly, analysts will need to provide context and meaning so decision makers can effectively use the insights they provide. That means, among other things, cleaning and polishing data, rendering results in easy-to-understand graphs and charts, and translating results into narratives that key decision makers can use to more effectively do their jobs.
As new technologies and data sources emerge, marketing continues to evolve, as do the tools marketers use to measure the effectiveness of their activities. Forward-leaning businesses understand the need to keep pace with these changes to succeed in an increasingly competitive business environment. And WiFi analytics platforms like Bloom Intelligence can help them succeed.
.svg "group-24 (1)")
