Data-Driven Marketing Success, Part 1: Getting Analytics Right

It’s one of the hottest words of the past few years – in marketing, especially:

Data. In a 2023 HubSpot survey, 36% of marketers said data is essential to reaching target audiences and understanding customers; 32% said investing in data boosts marketing ROI. Frankly, we’re surprised those numbers aren’t higher. Every marketer we know is clear on the fact that marketing has a new playbook compared to even just five years back. Gone are the days of casting a wide net and hoping to catch the right fish (customers!). To compete today, businesses need to deftly leverage accurate data about prospects, customers, and markets in order to identify qualified leads, understand their behavior, then target them accordingly.

And here’s the thing: Even though it’s called data-driven marketing, acquiring data is only half the equation. Like yin and yang, data is nothing without analytics. The act of understanding data, marketing analytics is maybe best described as data’s decoder pin. Analyzing marketing data is the act of making heads and tails of facts so you can gain valuable insights, track essential marketing metrics, and all in all make informed decisions that give you a fighting chance of stronger marketing strategies and ROI. Louder for the guy in the back: Effective use of analytics is crucial to data-driven marketing success.

There’s just one problem:

Many businesses get marketing analytics wrong.  

The Bridge Between Data and Decisions

When our Hammer Marketing digital marketing team talks with industry peers, one of the first questions we get is, “What analytics tools do you use?” – a testament to the importance of this detail to modern marketing.

Some digital agencies keep this detail close to their vest. Our team has no problem sharing. Our everyday go-to tools include:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – Google’s hotly-debated Universal Analytics replacement, GA4 offers insights into which file types website users are downloading, which pages are most visited, where traffic is coming from, and much more.
• Crazy Egg – the digital (and legal!) marketing equivalent of hiring James Bond, Crazy Egg’s heatmaps let you watch the way recent visitors used your website: where they lingered, what they clicked, the last thing they looked at before they bounced, what pages or calls-to-action prompted them to make a purchase or submit a lead, and more. It’s all displayed visually, so you can sidestep traditional data reports and digest it more readily.
• Looker Studio – formerly Google Data Studio, Looker Studio converts data from a number of reporting tools including GA4 and Crazy Egg into customizable, informative reports and dashboards that we share with our business clients for easier comprehension.

For us, these tools have become second nature. But those two words – for us – come with a caveat:

These programs come easily to us because we use them daily and have backgrounds in statistics and data analysis.

This is rarely the case for business owners, or even in-house marketing leads.

Hammer Marketing sees it all the time: Businesses seek us out because, despite using the same tools we do, they struggle to master the tools’ complex settings, stymieing everything from data access to data accuracy. Before tapping Hammer, many of our clients were making decisions based on incorrect data – a death knell for marketing. Many who did manage to get accurate data often found themselves stuck on what to do with it next.

As such, any business looking to leverage data-driven marketing should take one of the two paths:

• Learn, learn, and learn some more – intensive training on data marketing tools, and ideally some statistics and data analysis education, is integral to tackling data-driven marketing in-house. 
• Outsource to a digital agency – beyond taking this complex responsibility off of your desk, our expertise gives you a leg up on today’s dense marketing landscape. All day, every day, our Hammer Marketing team optimizes data-driven marketing tools. Metrics and insights gleaned from analytics become your business’s baseline, informing every decision we make moving forward. We launch campaigns and watch the activity. What works, stays; what doesn’t, goes. Even more, we abide by data collection best practices and compliance with regulations. You get peace of mind knowing that your tools have been set up correctly and are working, 24/7, in favor of your business.

Are you ready to put your crucial data-driven marketing in the hands of leading experts? Contact Hammer Marketing for a free consultation.