Marketing efforts are often hard to quantify in terms of dollars, revenue or impact, which is the main reason why executives are increasingly demanding more tangible and quantifiable metrics to show ROI. As a result, novel marketing analytics tools and technologies are constantly cropping up, and investors are increasingly willing to cough up cash for the development of new innovative solutions, as spending on marketing analytics is expected to nearly double over the next two years.

Nevertheless, marketing analytics still seems to be in its infancy, as many marketers are still struggling to get a grasp on which metrics to track. Well, there are no two ways about it that learning to pick and handle the appropriate analysis tools will be crucial to survive in today’s very competitive marketing industry. Especially all those who know how to tap big data most effectively will stand out and achieve excellent results, coming closer their ultimate goal which is to find out in real-time, which messages are working best, with which kind of consumer, in which context and media, in order to adjust and optimize marketing messages accordingly.

In fact, analysis tools are increasingly being used for issues such as executives or team development, leadership, headhunting, process optimization, recruiting, transformation etc. and are used here to no surprise as well to perform better. The advantages, such as transparency, comprehensibility and practicability, are simply significant and the reason why this trend will continue to grow.

Marketing has become too complex to be managed without analytics

Experts noticed for a long time already that analysis tools are getting more and more interest from businesses. Decision-makers in general have long recognized that analytics are useful and are needed to uncover causes and predict behavior, let alone lining up the necessary steps. Our marketing world has simply become too complex by now to do without them.

Those who work with customers keep themselves usually busy with just certain aspects of a larger whole, hence, tools are urgently needed to get the big picture. Interestingly, the clients of marketing agencies themselves demand it.  Understandably, they want on the one hand to comprehend the analysis and implementation, on the other hand, they naturally want to know what they can do with the results in practice, which means, knowing "What are the next steps? What does this mean for the employees and the company's future, etc.?”

They want tools that visualize results, simplify processes and clearly work out what to do. In this way, it is also more likely to win the entire workforce over. Because, only those who understand what is done in what way - and above all why - can make an important contribution and support  the success of a project.

The big picture is needed

Only if several tools are used together for an evaluation, is it possible to have an overall picture. Only then you can look for possible interfaces that bring more results together and provide a comprehensive view – the big picture. What is most important here is that the client can relate to the processes and understand it to initiate and implement the next steps in practice. As usual, the aim is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of a business in order to deal with it properly. By using the analysis results, the optimum market positioning gets easier, because more targeted responses can be delivered even faster.

By making the big picture more tangible, tools for analysis contribute to transparency and comprehensibility.

By Daniela La Marca