You can’t have marketing without analytics. Well, you can— but you’ll have a hard time finding success without the ability to create strategies around it, optimize against it, and measure success upon it. Having good analytics is essential to successful campaigns. If you have inaccurate or outdated data, you won’t be able to make decisions based on your analysis.

Creating a strategic analytics process allows you to better analyze your data to guide future efforts that drive results. Follow these three steps to set yourself up for analytics success:

Step 1: Build a solid data foundation

In order to get value from your data, it needs to be accurate, up-to-date and relevant. You can have tons of data to analyze—but if it isn’t the right data, you won’t be able to get the information you really need to drive your marketing efforts. Checking your data and your sources before you run analytics helps ensure you have the information you actually need.

Making sure you have the right data can be challenging. But the payoff will be worth it. Check on the state of your data with regular data audits to ensure it’s in top shape. Once you audit your data, you can address any issues. While a daunting task, getting your data in order is essential. Working with an external partner can be a big help in keeping your data in check.

Step 2: Widen your view

Make sure you’re looking at the big picture with your analytics. Analytics helps you understand your performance and make data-driven decisions on how to optimize. But you also should be looking at emerging opportunities, too.

To really be successful with your analytics you need to make sure you are capturing both buying signals from your target audience and from emerging markets. Keeping your net wide enough to capture information on these potential buyers can be key to giving you an edge over your competition.

Step 3: Stay objective

Keep bias at bay. Make sure you have an objective approach to your analytics. Having a sound, neutral analytics strategy goes hand in hand with having good data—you won’t be successful unless you have both.

Removing the bias from your analytics review can be harder than it sounds. It’s not uncommon for executives to see what they want to see in the numbers. Even worse, this bias can make them ignore numbers that don’t confirm their opinions. This can make you miss out on emerging opportunities. Stay objective when you review your analytics. You can learn a lot about your audience that you might have originally missed.

At the same time, while keeping industry benchmarks in mind, remember to measure against yourself. You know your business and where you need to drive improvements and optimizations better than anyone.

Next Steps

To get the most out of your analytics, you need to devote support and resources. Your team will need to invest in tools for data management and the right people to support your analytics. Ultimately, analytics can also help you prove the need for your marketing budget and resources in planning conversations.

Good analytics are vital to the success of your campaigns. Build a strategy for analytics into your marketing plan. Not sure where to start? Anteriad offers analytics solutions to help take your marketing efforts to the next level.