Marketing analytics

As an MBA student interested in a career in analytics, focusing on marketing analytics can be an interesting opportunity to explore your passion for analytics and your love for attracting and retaining customers.

Marketing analytics is a branch of analytics that focuses on measuring how well a company’s marketing efforts are performing and determining what can be done differently to get better results. Marketing analytics is becoming increasingly important as a result of businesses wanting to make data-driven marketing decisions.

A career in marketing analytic makes you an indispensable team member as your role covers value-adding tasks such as search engine optimization (SEO), trend analysis, brand management, social media campaigns, and more. With a good number of people interacting at all times online, companies are able to gain a competitive advantage by boosting their online presence and appealing to customers online using SEO. SEO is a cost-effective way of improving the customer's experience, hence increasing the probability of retaining customers.

For businesses that want to improve their online presence, click here for an opportunity to get a free SEO analysis of your online marketing strategy. 

Below is a summarized sample SEO report for Company XYZ.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION REPORT FOR COMPANY XYZ

The purpose of this report is to help the organization to increase its online brand visibility, benchmark against competitors, track target/ focus keywords that can deliver a ton of insight, and a marketing demand Return on Investment (ROI).

Section 1: Initial SEO Performance Analysis

An initial Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis was completed and some issues highlighted below were be identified. XYZ company's website has a 41.8 rating out of 100 based on base, speed, content, web, and mobile performance.

• The website does not contain any H1 headings. H1 headings help indicate the important topics of your page to search engines. 
• The website is using a few images alt on the pictures but this can be improved to help Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) deliver just as many images. results as they do text-based results. 
• The website does not have inline CSS;  Inlined CSS reduces the number of files the browser has to download prior to displaying your web page. If you are using an external CSS file, the browser must first load your HTML file, then download your CSS file.
• A Google Analytics script is not detected on this page. While there are several tools available to monitor your site's visitors and traffic sources, Google Analytics is a free, commonly recommended program to help diagnose potential SEO issues, track traffic, and help customize marketing campaigns.
• The website is not using a custom 404 error page.  By creating a custom 404 error page, you can improve your website's user experience by letting users know that only a specific page is missing/broken (and not your entire site), providing them helpful links, the opportunity to report bugs, and potentially track the source of broken links on your site.

Section 2: Keyword Analysis 

Tail keywords are those three and four keywords or phrases that are very specific to your business; these are the words that you want to train search engines to ascribe to your website. When a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. Considering cost and volume, niche key phrases that are worth considering with high search volume and low competition for XYZ company were breweries near me, craft beer near me and wine club.

Section 3: Competitor analysis

A SERP competitor analysis carried out with the keyword “Illinois brewery” reveals that XYZ Brewery’s major competitors are ABCD brewing company, XYZ Brewery, and New House Brewery. (See excel for more details)

Section 4: Key Suggestion to optimize your visibility on search engines include the following:

• User-friendliness: Having a mobile-friendly website is a critical part of your online presence. XYZ is a brand that targets young adults and mid-age who spend a lot of time on their phones. However, we noted some challenges with the mobile view of the website that needs an upgrade to keep the customers. Such as text being too small to read and clickable elements being too close together. This can be fixed from the dashboard of the CMS.

• Audience and Active Users: The XYZ web page is very thorough in giving information to help customers engage with their brand. To keep your audience active, you need to update the content, prices, and menu regularly. This is viewed on a search engine as an indicator of the site’s relevancy. In addition, use tools like Google console to crawl and index every page and new post on the website. XYZ has great website usability as well as an online store where customers can shop and see upcoming events. However, we will like to see links to social media channels where people can share their experiences and track customer reviews/ feedback.

• Google Local Business Listing: This is a list of top businesses recognized when users search for a keyword that includes the location IL. The search term ‘breweries near me’ or “craft beer” resulted in XYZ Restaurant and ABCD brewery being the second brewery on the list. XYZ has built up an upstanding reputation in the area as quality upscale dining and in-house beer provider over the last decade. Therefore, according to the FitSmallBusiness.com link, this correlates as to why they would be listed so high due to the quality and credibility of their webpage. Also, if they were to create a Google My Business page and identify keywords they could be prioritized on the SERP from a location-based search because of factors based upon how many good reviews XYZ has.

Section 5: Actionable Recommendations:

1. Company XYZ’s product offering has grown in depth since its inception. Therefore, when optimizing searches it is recommended to include phrases for the entire product offering.
2. Review and update the website’s H1 tag and ensure that all images have an image alt description that includes the business focus keywords
3. Create additional focus keywords based on search volumes such as (breweries near me, craft beer near me and wine club) and pay for them to drive marketing campaigns and brand equity. 
4. Consider identifying your competitors’ backlinks and use it to design XYZ’s campaign and marketing strategy on contents
5. Utilize additional free SEO free tools like Google console and indexing for each page/post to make sure that Google, Pinterest and other platforms all know exactly what your page is about, by adding schema.org data the right way, Google Analytics to help you track your ad campaign and traffic analysis. In addition, Yoast SEO, SEMrush and SEO power suite can help keep an eye on outdated contents and optimize your key words.
6. Improve your social media visibility by sharing new posts or products on social media and analyzing customer reviews. Creating more clicks and traffic will supplement the positive brand recognition that has been built. In turn, more positive reviews will come in which will assist in the process of XYZ’s product offerings to become the top result for location-based searches. 
7. Customize the 404-error page and provide links on how to resolve the issues, it is important to use a server signature to protect the website from cyber-attacks.

For businesses that are interested, we look forward to working with you to boost your online presence.