As digital marketers, data has become an ever-growing part of our jobs. We turn to analytics for insight into many of the decisions we make. Whether your team is using free applications like Facebook for Business or Google Analytics, or you pay for a more robust tool like HubSpot or Adobe Analytics, you know it’s integral to your internal marketing process.
But analytics can do even more for you, benefitting more than just your internal marketing process. When done right, analytics can help you improve transparency with leadership, stakeholders, and offer insights across your organization. Here are some ways that marketing analytics can improve transparency in your organization.
Show What’s Working (and Why)
Analytics are incredibly powerful for showing internal and external teams how your marketing efforts are working and then ROI you’re seeing. According to Hubspot, 75% of marketers use their reports to show how campaigns are directly impacting revenue. Whether you see positive or negative results, you’ll have a record of what you tried and how it worked in your analytics. This helps you to accurately report your efforts to those outside your team. Of course, this can be a double-edged sword, because if your strategy fails, there’s clear evidence that it failed. Seeing that failure so clearly is hard, but that’s how you learn and start a new approach.
On the other hand, when your marketing team’s efforts are successful, you have a a clearer picture of why. The “why” is very valuable when talking to upper management and other large stakeholders, because it helps justify your strategy going forward. Data can be an important tool for educating people on what you’re doing and why it works.
Plus, many data analytics platforms make it easy for you to share results, with clear charts, dashboards, and reports that can be downloaded as PDFs.
Building Trust With Stakeholders
When looking to build trust with your stakeholders, transparency is key. Your stakeholders might be clients, donors, partners or upper management. By sharing your results (good or bad) with stakeholders, you show your willingness to be transparent about your process. It’s same reason by nonprofits release their financials in an annual report each year – to build trust with their stakeholders.
In the same way, having a process for sharing your analytics helps hold your marketing team accountable for its work. It’s difficult to slack of or take it easy for a month when you know that your efforts will be displayed to your stakeholders at the end of it.
Gain Funding or Necessary Buy-In
For most people, numbers are the most credible form of proof for basically anything. Numbers can help people better comprehend or relate to concepts, and they can be incredibly compelling when you’re trying to argue for something you want. Maybe you want more funding, staff or additional resources for your team. Or maybe you simply want to try something new, and you need some level of support or approval to do so. Sharing data can help you make your case.
For example, say you want your brand to start a social media account for TikTok. You could quantitatively say, “The younger generation we’re trying to reach is using TikTok, so we should be on it.” But a more convincing approach would be to use Google Analytics to show the age of those who are most often coming to your website and interacting with your content, and then compare the dominant age group to the number of people in that age group who are using TikTok. By proving, with data, that your target audience is using TikTok frequently, you can make a strong case for having presence on the platform.
Offer Insights to Other Departments
Your marketing team isn’t the only one that can benefit from your data findings. Other departments you work closely with, such as sales and web development, can gather valuable insights from your data as well. By sharing this information with other teams, you may find you’re repeating efforts with your web team in some places, or that the data you’re collecting could spur a new, exciting strategy for your sales team. Or your development director may find opportunities for new brand partnerships through the trends you find.
Data analytics have a way of catalyzing collaboration among teams, so sharing them with others can be a great way to incite innovation and creativity.
At PRIME, our digital marketing team relies heavily on various analytics tools to help us make proven marketing decisions for our clients. If you’re looking for a marketing partner who can offer data-driven results, get in touch with us.
If you enjoyed this edition of PRIME Pulse, take a look at some of our other related articles:
- 4 Steps Toward a Better Content Marketing Strategy
- 5 Reasons Your Website is Never Really Done
- 10 Ways to Communicate Empathy and Authority Amidst Crisis
- 4 Reasons Your Messaging is Falling Flat
- The How-To on Facebook Marketing Campaigns
