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What it is and why marketers should care

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Everything is measurable in marketing

Measurement is a challenge to every aspect of marketing from attribution to campaign optimization. To meet that challenge, marketers need insights into the vast quantities of data being generated from the wealth of customer touchpoints. New technologies surface insights faster and create the opportunity to visualize and share data. Tools are even giving marketers the ability to predict interactions in order to increase efficiency and allow for real-time adjustments.

Data and analytics take the guesswork out of marketing. They help you get more value from your marketing budget (e.g., better efficiency), improve customer experience, and understand what channels, touchpoints, and strategies are working.

Marketing analytics is an approach to data analysis that helps businesses understand the performance and impact of their marketing investments. Businesses use marketing analytics tools to facilitate the collection, modeling, analysis, and visualization of marketing data.

New technologies are making old channels more accessible. For example, more digital marketers are expanding their campaigns to offline spaces thanks to technologies like programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH), which enables them to reach hyperlocal audiences on the street and at public venues.

This expanding digital ecosystem, combined with the proliferation of consumer and marketing data and the impending loss of third-party cookies, requires that marketers have a proactive marketing analytics strategy.

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In this post, we’ll cover the basics of marketing analytics — what it is, why it’s important, and how marketing teams can use it effectively. Key points covered include:

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

What is marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is an umbrella term used to describe the processes and technology involved in measuring a company’s marketing activities. Data is central to marketing analytics. Marketing data includes (but is not limited to) the following:

  • Website analytics: Website visits, traffic patterns, referral sources, bounce rate, etc.
  • Social media interactions: Social engagements, follows, profile views, shares, and DMs.
  • Online purchases and transactions: Leads, signups, and sales.
  • Paid ad campaign metrics: Ad views, clicks, CTR, CPM, CPC, conversions, conversion rate, CPL, and overall performance.
  • Customer data: Feedback, behavior, and purchase history.

The people involved in measuring a company’s marketing activities use technology and software that gathers marketing data, aggregates it, and provides visualizations to help them understand what tactics are working and how best to optimize marketing spend.

Types of marketing analytics models

There are three marketing analytics models that marketers use when planning, managing, and optimizing marketing campaigns. The goal of all three models is to help marketers make more insightful decisions about how to plan their campaigns and allocate their budgets.

  • Descriptive: Descriptive models use historical data culled from prior campaign activity to understand what happened and, based on this, inform future campaign planning. This is the “hindsight is 20/20” model, which looks at what happened with past campaigns and uses this information to inform future strategies.
  • Predictive: These models go a step further than descriptive, taking insights and using insights from past campaigns to try and predict customer behavior. This approach seeks to predict influence customer behavior to create a more informed (and targeted) marketing campaign.
  • Prescriptive: Prescriptive models use data from all touchpoints, weighing the impact of each interaction and initiative, for the purpose of creating a campaign that influences customer behavior and/or is more efficient. Prescriptive campaigns are highly targeted and often hyperlocal or focused on a current trend.
marketing analytics models

Why should you care about marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics can surface insights that you weren’t aware of, like how offline and online channels work together and how each consumer interaction influences the final sale or lead or signup (e.g., marketing attribution).

Here are some more reasons you should care about marketing analytics:

  • It provides tangible data around paid marketing initiatives — CPC, CPL, ROI, and brand lift.
  • It informs how your marketing campaigns and initiatives are performing, often in real-time, so you can optimize for improvement.
  • It connects your marketing campaigns to your website traffic and other metrics, enabling you to understand how various tactics and channels impact user and customer behavior.
  • It surfaces opportunities that influence future marketing and content strategies (e.g., a paid search campaign can inform your organic SEO content strategy).
  • It helps you do more with your advertising dollars and increase efficiency by reallocating spend to the most effective channels.
  • It provides a trove of data and information on customers and prospects which can be used to inform customer journey mapping and test the viability of new markets, products, and services.
  • It validates marketing expenses by tying ROI to initiatives.

What it is and how it identifies vital customer touchpoints

Explore capabilities from vendors like Adobe, Pointillist, SharpSpring, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer journey analytics platforms.

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Who uses or works with marketing analytics tools?

Marketing analytics tools are generally the purview of marketing teams. Here are some use cases that highlight how marketing data is used.

Budget optimization. Your marketing budget has been cut by 10%, 15%, or 30% and you need to refocus your marketing strategy on the best-performing channels and tactics. By analyzing the performance against predetermined KPIs, you can reallocate your budget to the historically best-performing channels.

Media planning. Marketing analytics provides historical data which can be used to make better media planning decisions. You can use results from past campaigns to inform ad creative, media mix, and test new channels. Importantly, marketing analytics ensures that your media choices reflect your audiences’ preferences, and not just what your gut is telling you.

Content planning. Website traffic metrics, paid search campaign reports, keyword trends, and user behavior provide valuable information about what your customers are interested in. You can use this information to plan your content and messaging strategies, for example, by reviewing top content on your website, the most engaging social media posts, and using social media listening tools that surface insight and buzz around a given trend or product.

Create audiences and build customer personas. Marketing campaign data can help you better define and understand your customers so you can build more targeted audiences for future campaigns. Identifying customer content preferences can help you craft content that specific audiences are more likely to engage with. This also helps improve a customer’s experience with your brand.

Key goals of marketing analytics

Here are some of the main goals marketing analytics tools can help brands meet:

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  • Understanding what marketing channels, tactics, and approaches work best to achieve a business goal (e.g., growth, sales, leads, etc.).
  • Measuring ROI from marketing and advertising initiatives.
  • Capturing data from website sessions to better understand what content customers value.
  • Observing how users interact with website features and objects like buttons, video, and forms.
  • Monitoring, managing, and optimizing performance for digital and offline marketing campaigns.
  • Creating audience segments for more precise ad and content targeting and personalization.
  • Providing clear data visualizations to better analyze and act on data for a variety of audiences, including executive/board level as well as tactical reporting.
  • Enabling different teams and departments to share campaign performance and collaborate on marketing strategy.
  • Understanding how content, marketing, sales, customer behavior, and all marketing and sales initiatives are working together (e.g., customer journey analytics).

The variety of touchpoints connected to the modern customer journey are transforming the way marketers track their campaigns. Where once data analysis was focused on browser and website activity, now consumers are combining online and offline channels to learn about companies, brands, and products.

A recent Google poll revealed that over 70% of people described themselves as channel-agnostic, meaning they were more flexible about whether they buy offline or online. Analytics tools can help marketers keep track of this growing subset of customers.

There are a variety of ways that marketers get the data they need to, plan, analyze and optimize campaigns and no shortage of tools available to help get the job done. Some of these tools can also collect data from offline channels and integrate it with digital campaign data. They include:

  • Website analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and MixPanel.
  • Campaign analytics tools like Semrush, Cyfe, and Klipfolio.
  • Social analytics tools like SproutSocial and HootSuite.
  • Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Falcon.io.
  • Customer journey analytics (CJA) software like Sprinklr, Thunderhead, and Pointillist.
  • Sales intelligence tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and ActiveCampaign.
  • Marketing data aggregators like Domo and Supermetrics.
  • Company financial data.

Many of the above-listed tools have features that intersect with each other. Google Analytics has robust website traffic analytics, campaign analytics, and some journey mapping capabilities.

SproutSocial provides social media engagement analytics and social listening to help users surface trends and insights from social data.

It’s standard operating procedure for marketers to use more than one tool or platform. Thus, it’s becoming increasingly important to connect and integrate your marketing data sources into one (and please forgive us for this buzzword) “single source of truth,” which lets you understand your entire marketing ecosystem. Tools like Domo and Supermetrics integrate data from multiple sources, where it can be used to create marketing reports and dashboards.


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How marketing analytics can help marketers succeed

As customer journeys shift and new touchpoints and channels emerge, showing how ad campaigns and marketing initiatives work together to achieve a goal will become more important. The marketing ecosystem is also becoming more digital, with digital marketing comprising nearly 60% of marketing budgets according to the AMA’s 2021 CMO Survey.

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Marketing analytics can help CMOs demonstrate the effectiveness of their campaigns. It’s the best way to illustrate the tangible impact that marketing has on business success. And as marketing budgets become fragmented across more channels, tools, and initiatives, marketing analytics can help ensure there’s adequate funding for the next quarter’s ad and marketing campaign spending.

Resources for learning more about marketing analytics

Do you want to learn more about marketing analytics? We recommend the following resources:

Marketing attribution and predictive analytics: A snapshot

What it is. Marketing attribution and predictive analytics platforms are software that employ sophisticated statistical modeling and machine learning to evaluate the impact of each marketing touch a buyer encounters along a purchase journey across all channels, with the goal of helping marketers allocate future spending. Platforms with predictive analytics capabilities also use data, statistical algorithms and machine learning to predict future outcomes based on historical data and scenario building.

Why it’s hot today. Many marketers know roughly half their media spend is wasted, but few are aware of which half that is. And with tight budgets due to the economic uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are seeking to rid themselves of waste.

Attribution challenges. Buyers are using more channels and devices in their purchase journeys than ever before. The lack of attributive modeling and analytics makes it even more difficult to help them along the way.

Marketers continuing to use traditional channels find this challenge magnified. The advent of digital privacy regulations has also led to the disappearance of third-party cookies, one of marketers’ most useful data sources.

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Marketing attribution and predictive analytics platforms can help marketers tackle these challenges. They give professionals more information about their buyers and help them get a better handle on the issue of budget waste.

Read Next: What do marketing attribution and predictive analytics tools do?


About The Author

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Jacqueline Dooley is a freelance B2B content writer and journalist covering martech industry news and trends. Since 2018, she’s worked with B2B-focused agencies, publications, and direct clients to create articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks. Prior to that, Dooley founded Twelve Thousand, LLC where she worked with clients to create, manage, and optimize paid search and social campaigns.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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