Making the business case for investing in marketing insight software should be an easy sell to your marketing department but it might not be as simple when it comes to those who handle the budgets.
However, we think that there are three things you really need to measure in your business which you can use to demonstrate the pros and cons of the argument so your boss can appreciate why marketing insight software and business intelligence tools should be part of your organisation’s marketing strategy.
We all know that starting a new initiative and deploying new software, or equipment, involves more than just the cost of the product itself. There’s the additional training, potential new equipment or storage space required and it’s often time-consuming to introduce new marketing insight tools into your daily routine.
You need to be able to convince the financial team that the information you will gain from using analytics software and business intelligence tools is worth the cost and that they will deliver on bottom-line benefits.
Here are three of the many potential benefits to help you make the business case for marketing insight software:
1 – Tracking customer satisfaction
The easiest way of convincing those in charge of the money is that analytics software can help you track, record, and act on, customer satisfaction.
Your customers are where your business stands or falls and knowing what they are thinking, how they are behaving and what they are buying is vitally important to any marketing department.
According to Zendesk: “Studies of customer feedback tell us that more and more customers prefer self-service over contacting a support agent and a whopping 91% say they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs.”
The Quantifying the business impact of customer service, survey carried out by Dimensional Research in December of 2018 on behalf of Zendesk, found that customer service directly impacts long-term revenue.
- 89% say a quick response to an initial inquiry is important when deciding which company to buy from;
- 97% say bad customer service changes buying behaviour, and 87% say good customer service changes buying behaviour;
- 46% continue to change their buying behaviour two years after a bad customer service experience.
The study used an online survey of 1,044 US consumers who had received online or phone customer service to draw its conclusions.
From the simplest methods – customer satisfaction surveys – through to complex chatbots, which can act as your customer support department, you can gather data on how your end users feel about your business.
Look at tools like LiveChat or Tawk, a free alternative chatbot.
2 – Marketing strategy effectiveness
You cannot plan a marketing strategy if you have no method of judging whether it has been successful or not.
Your content must support your business goals. Once you’ve got that established, you will then use a cohesive marketing strategy in combination with social media to get the right messages out to your existing customer base and to potential new clients.
Tracking vanity metrics – the likes, comments and shares on social media, is no longer the best way to justify your Return on Investment for marketing departments. You need to be able to demonstrate people are visiting your website and seeing what your business is offering them.
Here is where analytics software truly comes into its own. But Google Analytics, the most well known of them all, is a complex and complicated option for many people who don’t really understand how to get the best out of it. It also lacks specific campaign intelligence reporting, which makes it hard to measure how specific parts of your marketing efforts are performing.
Software like Beacon allows you to access the necessary campaign analytics in a simple dashboard with all the information and marketing intelligence at your fingertips. For example, you can instantly see how your Facebook Ad campaign sent traffic to the associated Landing Page and what actions they performed, or if your monthly email brought in any direct sales and measure the customer journey across the website.
Beacon analyses the behaviour of traffic that your various marketing channels send to your website, right down to individual visitor, enabling you to see what’s really working for you and what isn’t. Its cost per visit calculator lets marketers get a view of how their digital campaigns and channels are doing in terms of return on investment.
And it also has a Bot Activity Indicator, a handy widget which shows you the percentage of your website visits that are fraudulent or bots – revealing the true value of your digital marketing and giving you ample reasons to justify the business case for analytics software.
3 – Detecting trends
Staying ahead of the game isn’t just a cliched saying, it’s vitally important for any business to know what’s likely to be influencing their market space within the next 12 to 18 months.
The fashion industry works months in advance when planning collections and looking at style trends but it’s not often a commonplace business practice for the more traditional industries.
Market trend analytics are perfect here for looking at and predicting patterns in behaviour, either that of your customers or that of your competitors. Be aware of forthcoming legislation which might affect your business’ bottom line, look at what’s happening abroad in other parts of the world to see if the trend may move to your home market.
Make sure you’re following market leaders and read research reports or solution guides those companies put out. Their research will usually provide valuable information relevant to what’s currently trending in your market space.
As Gary Vaynerchuk says: “To grow a business, you must be a marketplace observer, and a practitioner of what you observe.”
Tools like Google Trends and Moz can be used to track keywords and look at what are popular search terms relevant to your business. Listen to your clients, ask them what they might be looking for in the future.
Analytics-driven organisations are 2.2 times more likely to outperform industry peers than those that do not use advanced analytics according to an MIT Sloan Management Review.
In Conclusion
Analytics won’t solve problems within your organisation, but using analytics software will help identify what is, and isn’t working, with those vitally important sections of your business – your customers, your online presence and your marketplace.