Have You Thought About These 9 Key Sales and Marketing Analytics?

Identifying essential data is key to a thriving business. It’s more than just a question of sales – although your sales will benefit. Harnessing commercially relevant insights through marketing analytics can uncover new markets, engage new target customers, and lead to prosperous future developments. 

Just what are these powerful, actionable and commercially relevant data types? Let’s review some of the most effective sales and marketing analytics to help put your business at an advantage. 

1. Unmet needs 

Knowing what the customer wants is essential to the success of your business. Finding areas of dissatisfaction among your customers is the secret to reconciling unmet needs surrounding your product, service, or within your market. 

Once you identify the gap between your customers’ needs and your business offering, you can close that gap through new products or product improvements – in other words more business opportunities. By meeting your customer’s expectations, you’ll keep them happy and increase revenue.

• Possible tools to identify unmet customer needs include: 
• Creating a customer journey map 
• Reviewing customer service emails
• Conducting customer surveys

2. Market size 

You don’t know how viable your business proposition is until you’ve measured the size and potential of your market. Knowing whether there’s a market for your products and services and gauging growth potential can save you time and money down the road. 

Marketing analytics can reveal valuable metrics to help you gauge this potential. Metrics that measure the size of your market may include:

• How many customers does your company or competitor companies have?
• Does pricing change often in your industry? 
• How much revenue does your market have to offer?

Sources of information that offer data-driven insights include government data, trade association data and financial data from your competitors.

3. Demand forecasting

Your high school history teacher wasn’t wrong. Sometimes, in order to predict the future we must study the past. How can you estimate demand through market analytics? 

Demand forecasting looks at sales data from the past to determine the consumer demand in the future. With an accurate demand forecast, you’ll have more efficient operations, better customer service, and reduced lead time on manufacturing products. 

An accurate demand forecast offers valuable information about your potential which managers can use to make informed decisions about pricing, business growth strategies, and market potential. Start by reviewing past sales data, marketing budgets, promotional activities, competitor prices, and current demand trends of your target market. 

4. Market trends

Without knowing market trends you’ll never truly know your market audience. Additionally, when your market audience isn’t clear, it’s difficult to build consumer trust or recognize what market trends will make revenue soar.  In-depth trend analysis should reveal clear actions you can take in regards to market scenario, consumer preferences, and consumer trust.

In market trend analysis, we review past and current market behavior and dominant patterns of the market and consumers. Surveys, interviews, and observations of consumer behavior all contribute to understanding the trends and behavior in the market.

5. Who isn’t your consumer?

It’s obvious that you’d want to gather data on current consumers, but what about prospective consumers? 

Another key marketing strategy is understanding people who are currently not your customers. Start by asking: 

• How do they perceive your brand? 
• What do they think about your product?  

By identifying who isn’t buying your products and why, you can expand your market to include prospective buyers. A few ways to discover what they think is by conducting interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. Social media is a great source for this feedback. 

6. Who is your competitor?

Besides the consumer, you’ll have to know the fellow competitors in your market. The more insights you gather on your competitors, the more powerful your competitive edge becomes. 

Start by collecting and reviewing information about your strongest competitors. Analyze their content and products to help you determine opportunities to outperform them. Ask yourself: 

• What types of content creation do your competitors focus on? 
• What is their product’s value? 

Determine the quality of their content and deliverables and how it compares to yours. By comparing information about competitors, you’ll find opportunities for improvement.

7. Pricing analysis

You can drive profitability with the data you already own. For example, mining your company’s owned data for past pricing and purchasing trends can help predict future profitability. Good analytics help companies identify factors that are often overlooked—such as the broader economic situation, product preferences, and sales-representative negotiations—to reveal what drives prices for each customer segment and product. 

Pricing strategies include data mining and the development of forecasting models and algorithms. The first step, as always, is identifying your research goals. Perhaps you want to know what customers are willing to pay for a product or a service? With pricing research, you’ll be able to capture the highest return on product investment. 

8. Sales and distribution channels

Conducting a marketing analysis is a great way to determine the right channels for getting your product in the hands of buyers. 

There’s a seemingly endless choice of possible sales outlets: e-commerce websites, third-party sales, direct sales, dealers, and brick-and-mortar retailers. In-depth sales and distribution analysis may help your business find the sweet spot between efficiency, customer satisfaction, and affordability. 

Of course, different segments of your market will be engaged through different channels. It’s important to know which channels are working and which are less effective. 

9. Brand analysis

Your brand is much more than a logo or catchphrase. How customers perceive the look and feel of your product will negatively or positively impact your sales strategy. 

You can (and should) capture data about your brand – it’s floating around anywhere people are discussing your brand. Pay attention to customer service conversations, sales conversations, online forums, blogs, review sites, and social media. 

A professional in-depth brand analysis can lead to more informed rebranding efforts, help you develop a customer loyalty program, and more. 

Want to learn more about how to increase your revenue by leveraging your company data? Need personalized market analytics? If you’re ready to dive deep into your data, we can help.