Understanding the Role of Data Analytics in Marketing of Academic Brands

Marketing is a ROI driven business function. How do you make it accountable has been a challenging tasks for brands since long. However, with the advent of technology, measuring the performance of marketing campaigns is no more a fallacy. As a result, data analytics is now changing the face of a brand’s marketing initiative.

Data science has enabled brands to design measureable, predictive and accurate campaigns. Marketers often know that only half of their advertising works. The problem is, they don’t know which half. But with the help of big data science it is possible today to spot weak and strong marketing inventories and make timely interventions to take corrective action.

Data analytics has contributed significantly to the growth of market research in recent times. Analysis of data points helps in understanding consumer behaviour, forecasting emerging consumption trends and analysing effectiveness of campaigns. Besides, data science can be used to enhance effectiveness of multiple aspects of modern marketing such as SEO, SEM, content marketing, etc.

With the arrival of digital marketing, brands are generating huge scale of data points to study consumer buying process and its engagement pattern with the brand. So what areas does data science precisely impact in marketing and why it should matter to marketers?

A few areas where the impact can be seen are following:

1. Consumer Segmentation

Use of data science in marketing helps to create structured segmentation of consumers based on various factors such as consumption pattern, search history, purchase life cycle, social media behaviour et al. This empowers marketers to launch customized product offerings and services.

2. Messaging & Content Development

With data sciences it is now possible to analyse marketing messages today. As a result of this, messaging has become more objective and personalized. Testing and trial is possible on real time to design messages that a consumer is most likely to respond to. It allows customization of messages for delivering better ROI. A consumer need not receive same message multiple times but is now sent communication as per the buying stage he or she is in.

3. Boosting Marketing Investments

Return on marketing investment has been the most challenging issue faced by marketers earlier.  But after the use of advanced analytics, it is possible to track spending on any number of marketing activities – be it social media or traditional advertising.

4. Marketing Attribution

Use of data science has seen highest impact in the development of marketing attribution. It has empowered marketers to measure every single penny invested and re-allocate attribution of sources to improve campaign performance. Due to advance data science in marketing attribution even traditional media is getting unified with digital technology to measure its direct impact on advertising ROI.

5. Forecasting

Data Science is increasingly helping marketing teams to completely revolutionize predictive analysis of consumer trends & behaviours. It is delivering outstanding results to map consumer expectations accurately.

The digital world is replete with consumer data. It provides valuable information about the target market. This information is then studied to churn out patterns to forecast a certain trend.

6. Social Media Campaigns – are you doing it right?

Social media is the biggest beneficiary of data science. The whole foundation of social platforms is based on data analytics. Social campaigns are increasingly becoming more and more accountable and ROI driven.

Brands on social media can create greater brand presence and greater level of engagement with more specific set of potential audience using data analytics. They can conquer the digital world with big data. Data science enables you to choose the right social platforms and set individual campaign goals.

At the end of the day, what works in marketing and what doesn’t is the key insight that you get using data science. You can also reset your social media strategy to achieve desired outcomes if needed. Use of data science ultimately helps to justify the budget allocated to various social media properties.

7. Customer Profiling

Data science is immensely useful in customer profiling and identifying common behaviour patterns. It presents critical insights into consumer demographics that empowers marketer with richer descriptions of customer profiles.

After churning all the data available, the marketing team is able to uncover salient user insights to design campaigns. This kind of advance profiling allows marketers to launch targeted campaigns.

8. Improved Pricing Strategy

Data science has a massively positive effect on pricing of marketing inventories as these are now evidence based. This results in effective price management.

9. Advance Lead Scoring Mechanism

Data science enables you to create a predictive lead scoring system – an algorithm capable of calculating the probability of conversion and segmenting your lead list into various categories such as hot, warm and cold leads. Lead scoring can impact conversions and reduce marketing costs.

10. Faster and More Accurate Decision Making

Data science enhances the decision making skills of marketers. Better decision making means higher conversions in real-time. Businesses are better equipped to act faster on their leads.

With the arrival of data science, analyses of various channels simulates a variety of potential actions to bring the best business outcomes.

11. Personalized Customer Experiences for Delivering Relevant Offerings

One of the greatest advantages of data science is you can deliver right products at the right time and to the right people. Due to the benefits of data science, your sales and marketing team is able to understand their audience on a very granular level. With this knowledge, a brand can create the best possible customer experiences.

12. Identifying Opportunities

With a robust data analytics system in place, institutions can develop opportunities to continuously and constantly improve the value that is derived from their marketing efforts.

13. Identification and Refining of Target Audiences

The importance of data science is based on the ability to identify potential audience and customize the existing ones to combine with overall audience base. These insights can be used to learn more about potential audience.

Data science can help with the identification of the key target groups with precision. With this in-depth knowledge, an organizations can customize its offerings to suit the need of customer groups.

Conclusion

Data science can add tremendous value to marketing operations of any academic entity. With a variety of digital avenues, extracting valuable data to understand the impact of each marketing channel is the key to success.

Big data creates opportunity for businesses and marketers hone in on specific insights and results that leverage both the brand and the user experience. When the key value points of a marketing channel are tapped into, there is room for scalability and growth.

Understanding new trends is pivotal for developing a long term marketing strategy. Marketing Data Analytics is critical to SEO activities. Big data has put a spin on forecasting, advanced web analytics, and marketing attribution.

As technology becomes widely adopted, the field of data science is ever evolving. Many new tools to data mining will help in understanding the consumer journey.