Marketing plan: analytics and its importance
Marketing has become one of the most strategic departments in companies today, even more so when it is possible to work together with the sales department, combining communication with the commercial part of the business. And like every department, marketing also needs a guide, in this case, called a marketing plan.
A marketing plan knows how to position itself concerning its competitors, what to sell, how, and whom. And this chain of activities and relationships can be complex, which justifies it being very well planned.
This marketing plan consists of several steps, and in this post, you will:
- Know all the necessary steps to carry out a marketing plan.
- Go deeper into the analytics stage of this plan.
- Being able to get great insights into your current marketing plan condition!
What are the steps of a marketing plan?
A complete marketing plan consists of 5 steps:
- Executive Summary
- Market Research
- Strategy
- Execution
- Analytics
If you are interested in going deeper into these steps, I suggest reading this article: Marketing Plan: executive summary and its importance.
The analytics phase and its importance
The analysis stage aims to understand what results have been achieved, if the company is on the right path, and what trends are on the horizon. Therefore, it is a practice that reports the past, analyzes the present, and guides the future.
Today companies have a plethora of data at their disposal about their performance, the market, consumers, and competitors. After all, (almost) everything can be tracked, monitored, and stored these days. But this data, by itself, is useless if the company doesn’t know how to deal with it. So, the analytics stage is where we dedicate ourselves to them: by creating a data-driven structure and culture. It is where we start to track, collect and analyze data strategically to achieve your marketing goals.
Thus, the analytics stage proves to be one of the most critical business plan tools, which refers to transforming data into intelligence as a support for business management.
To guide this step, we can outline strategies divided into:
- Monitoring: discover new tendencies monitor variables that are beyond our control. In here, you have access to everything going on, and your monitoring reports will serve as a base to conclude your evaluation.
- Evaluation: evaluate the operational strategy based on the results achieved. Here you combine the goals with the monitoring report. It is the moment to identify if something needs to be changed and why, where, and how much this change might cost.
There is another vital topic within marketing to have efficient monitoring: KPIs. You monitor the execution of strategies, but what does this mean exactly? The number of visitors on a page? The number of views on a video? Conversions from a form?
If the monitoring process is confusing, one of the big reasons could be that your KPIs are not clear.
Last but not least, an essential part of your analysis is the insights you can take from them. Numbers and infographics per se do not add value to an operation, but the combination of numbers, charts, and interpretations of it can lead to great exponential success.
How has the process of analyzing marketing strategies in your company been? Have you been able to generate insights from the results?
If you are interested in evolving in analytics, talk to me, and I can help you!