Marketing analytics is a set of tools used by market researchers to measure, analyze, and interpret marketing metrics so that they can make informed decisions about brand development and customer experiences. Especially in this era of big data, marketing analytics has become a powerful tool in the pursuit of important business goals like improving brand equity and increasing customer lifetime value.
In order to derive meaningful insights from customers, market research has always used direct tools like surveys and marketing experiments. Yet, now with e-commerce and social media creating vast customer datasets, data analysis techniques can be used to create more sophisticated models of consumer behavior. For example, linear regression analysis can be used to identify key variables affecting customer purchases, allowing for the creation of predictive analytics that can be used to guide marketing choices.
Analytics skills help organizations navigate the future by enabling them to harness insights from the ever-expanding pools of data being generated each and every moment. Being able to make sense of this data is important for marketing professionals of all kinds, making marketing analytics a valuable skill for brand managers, survey researchers, social media specialists, and chief marketing officers (CMOs) alike.
A background in marketing analytics is particularly important for market research analysts. They gather, analyze, and interpret data on products, customers, and competitors to inform product development, advertising, and sales plans. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they make a median salary of $63,790 per year, and their job growth is expected to be much faster than the average for all occupations due to the increasing use of data and market research across many industries.
Absolutely! Coursera offers a broad range of online courses and Specializations on marketing analytics, as well as associated topics like digital marketing and business analytics. With Coursera, you can learn about marketing analytics remotely from top-ranked institutions like the University of Virginia, Emory University, and the University of Pennsylvania, so you won’t have to sacrifice the quality of your education to learn online.
You’ll be completing the same coursework and working with the same faculty as on-campus students, yet at a lower tuition. And, with collaborative group projects, you’ll also get to practice the teamwork skills that are so important to marketing teams the world over.
The skills and experience that you might need to already have before starting to learn marketing analytics would include a keen sense of B2C or B2B purchasing habits, a strong knowledge of keyword research and data analytics, and an understanding of the basics of SEO. Marketing analysts use these skills together to analyze, measure, and manage the marketing performance of a product or service. This process involves data analytics, marketing research, sales and inventory, and other data points to help optimize a product’s return on investment (ROI).
The kind of people best suited for work that involves marketing analytics are people who are good at understanding business, marketing, and consumer behavior. When you work in marketing analytics, you need to organize data, develop spreadsheet models to analyze the data, and use this finished product to support business decisions about consumers for your products. People in marketing analytics may be creative and analytical at the same time, using both sides of the brain to make accurate product management decisions. The kind of people who are best suited for marketing analytics roles may be the ones who understand how to measure brand and customer assets, evaluate the effectiveness of keywords in an SEO campaign, and know the basics of pinpointing key marketing messages.
You might know if learning marketing analytics is right for you if you love to study data and try to analyze any obvious patterns that can help you adjust marketing messages. For instance, if the marketing analytics shows you a pattern of more sales over weekends for a certain online course, then you can use this information to bring possible discounts and savings to high-volume buyers on the weekend. If you love to Interpret data in these ways for future marketing and business decisions, then learning marketing analytics may be the right career move for you.