In today’s digital era, collecting our customers data is easier than before; digitalization of marketing has made our job even easier. Through many different channels, we can access a wide variety of information about our customers. Even though we have so much data, it is also important to be able to use this data meaningfully. Since the data comes from dozens of different sources, it can be quite challenging to determine the most valuable insights.
So, what should we do in this situation? This is where cross-channel marketing analytics steps in as a powerful tool to help us.
In our latest blog posts, we explained what cross-channel marketing and cross-channel marketing attribution mean. Today, we will delve into cross-channel marketing analytics.
What does Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics mean?
Cross-channel marketing analytics is a comprehensive analysis of marketing metrics from different sources. To be able to understand consumer behavior, tracking campaign performance, and optimizing marketing strategies, analytics has a key role for cross-channel marketing strategies. Cross-channel marketing analytics allows businesses to collect and analyze data from different sources. These sources can range from social media metrics to website traffic, email open rates, paid channels, mobile apps, and other platforms. In this process, you will identify patterns, trends, and correlations across channels.
Cross-channel marketing analytics involve the use of analytics tools and techniques to gain insights into how customers interact with our brand. We can gain a comprehensive view of our customers’ journey across channels by leveraging the power of analytics. And then we can simply analyze our metrics to create a strategy tailored to our target audience and business needs.
Note: Please note that the terms “Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics” and “Cross-Channel Analytics” are closely related but can have nuanced differences in their focus and application. Both concepts share the fundamental principle of integrating data from diverse channels to gain comprehensive insights which drive strategic decision-making and improve overall business performance. But, cross-channel marketing analytics tends to emphasize marketing-centric data analysis, while cross-channel analytics spans a wider spectrum of business touchpoints and interactions.
Benefits of Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics
Cross-channel marketing analytics offers several key benefits:
- You can better understand your customer’s journeys. As we explained earlier, cross-channel marketing analytics provides a comprehensive view of customer behavior across various channels. You can create detailed customer profiles and gain information about your customers’ preferences, behavior, and their overall customer journey using the data collected from multiple sources. By identifying the touch points that contribute to conversions in this journey, you can create better targeted marketing strategies.
- You can identify the most effective marketing channels. The best part of cross-channel marketing analytics is that it offers a direct benefit: you can easily understand which channels are most effective in engaging and converting customers, so you can do more of what works. When you identify the most impactful channels, you can allocate your marketing budgets accordingly. This data-driven approach will help you to optimize your marketing spend and maximizing ROI.
- You can make your decisions based on data. You can use cross-channel marketing analytics insights to make informed decisions based on reliable data. This will reduce the guesswork and increase the chances of success.You can make real-time changes in marketing campaigns and instantly respond to changing customer behaviors by using this reliable data.
Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics
Although cross channel marketing analytics provides great benefits to companies, it is also possible to encounter some difficulties in practice. Top 2 challenges you need to be aware of about cross-channel marketing analytics:
- The success of the analysis depends on the quality of your source data. If your source data is poor or outdated, the result you will get will also be wrong or misleading. Gaining accurate, high-quality data from multiple channels will be a significant challenge. Integrating data from different sources with different formats and structures is also another challenge, which can lead to inconsistencies and inaccuracies, affecting the reliability of the analytics.
- Another challenge that marketers who starts to implement cross-channel marketing analytics may face is to be able to distribute their efforts evenly across different channels. The purpose of cross-channel marketing is to connect with your target audience with consistent and accurate messaging across as many channels as possible. That’s why you need to focus several channels at the same time; you cannot be successful by prioritizing only the 1-2 best performing channels.
Implementing and maintaining cross-channel marketing analytics demand significant resources in technology and skilled personnel. You must provide equal focus and resources across all platforms. This can be a really hard thing to accomplish, especially if your business has limited resources and diverse channel requirements.
Tools for Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics
When implementing cross-channel marketing analytics, you are going to need the right tools. Here are some of the most used tools to consider:
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used tool on the market, and I am sure almost everyone has heard of it. It is a free web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for (SEO) and marketing purposes. It provides a platform for tracking and analyzing website traffic, user behavior, conversion rates, channel marketing metrics. Even if it is not a solely cross-channel analytics tool, it still has extensive range of features for both beginners and advanced users. It’s free, it can be used without any training, you can customize your reports based on your business needs and it can easily be integrated with other Google products,
- CRM Platforms: There are lots of CRM (Customer relationship management) platforms out there which lets marketers to store customer information and manage marketing campaigns. So, if you are using a CRM platform, you already have features for tracking customer interactions, managing customer data, and analyzing customer behavior. Some CRM platforms also offers a comprehensive set of cross-channel marketing analytics tools that can be easily customized and adjusted by your needs (such as HubSpot).
- Marketing Automation Platforms: Marketing automation platform is a software that handles routine marketing tasks without the need for human action.Andsome marketing automation tools (such as Marketo) collect data from various channels. These tools enable cross-channel campaign management, tracking, and analytics, allowing you to automate processes and gain insights from different channels.
- Social Media Analytics Tools: While there are many social media platforms on the market right now, there are also lots of social media analytics tools for businesses to control their social media content. (Such as Hootsuite). These tools allow you to publish and promote your content and help track the performance of your campaign on social media channels. Some of them also provide analytics capabilities to measure social media performance, engagement, and reach across different platforms.