In today’s data-driven marketing world, analytics are the key to success for businesses in every industry. Although knowing conversion rates is important, you’ll also want to note that tracking customer data across the entire marketing funnel gives deeper insights into how you can improve marketing campaigns.
Exploring what to track along the entire marketing funnel and the tools to use makes it possible to address hang-ups before they turn customers away. In this blog, we’ll also cover some of the most common mistakes people make and the best ways to unify your data to make strategic changes to your marketing plans.
What Is the Marketing Cycle?
The marketing cycle describes the sequence of actions that a prospective customer will typically take as they interact with a brand or product. As you might expect, the first phase of the marketing cycle involves the customer becoming aware of the brand’s products or services.
The typical customer then begins the consideration stage where the think about making a purchase. If all goes well, then the customer will enter the conversion stage where they take the desired action.
Simply getting a customer to buy a product or service isn’t enough to grow sales. Instead, you’ll also want to consider the retention stage that encourages repeat business by helping customers continue to love and use your company’s products or services.
The final stage of the customer journey involves advocacy. Here, your company can benefit from referrals and testimonials from satisfied customers who essentially begin serving as brand ambassadors.
Continuously using data tracking across all of these stages helps to improve the customer experience and ROI on your brand’s marketing plans.
Why Tracking Customer Data Across All Stages is Crucial
Customer data tracking improves personalization and segmentation. Once you know what attracts and keeps your customers’ attention, you can use marketing automation to boost lead quality and conversion rates. Our analytics services make it easier to make smart, informed decisions on marketing campaigns that speak to your target audience’s needs.
Stage by Stage Guide: What to Track and the Tools to Use
Taking a look at what happens during each stage of the marketing cycle helps you develop a full-funnel strategy plan for your company to follow.
Awareness Stage
At this stage, the ultimate goal is to determine what channels bring in top-of-the-funnel traffic. To do so, we’ll use metrics that include the impressions, reach, referral traffic and click-through rates. Google Analytics 4, SEMrush and Meta Ads Manager are a few tools that we use to analyze brand awareness patterns.
Consideration Stage
Customers who are heavily in the research stage provide our team with metrics that include email signups, webinar attendance, eBook downloads and the amount of time they spend browsing company websites and social media. We use tools such as HubSpot, Market and Hotjar to understand content engagement and what is working for lead nurturing.
Conversion Stage
Optimizing the conversion paths is the ultimate goal during this stage. Some of the marketing data tools we use here are Shopify, Google Tag Manager and A/B testing tools. These all help us to analyze data from metrics that include form completions, cart activity and bounce rates along with purchases.
Retention Stage
Here, we are aiming to keep happy customers engaged and coming back. We achieve this goal by analyzing metrics such as the churn rate, product usage and repeat purchases. Our team uses loyalty platforms, NPS surveys and Klavioyo to gather data and generate insights.
Advocacy Stage
Happy customers often extend the ROI your company gets from marketing campaigns by acting as brand ambassadors. We can use tools such as Yotpo, ReferralCandy and Sprout Social to review metrics such as reviews, referrals and social mentions.
How to Connect and Analyze Your Customer Data
Connecting and analyzing your customer data is easier when you integrate marketing data tools across the tech stack for unification. Using a centralized CRM or CDP such as HubSpot, Segment of Salesforce makes it easier to connect data from key metrics. For the best results, we can help your company build custom dashboards using tools like Looker Studio.
Real-Life Example: What Full-Cycle Tracking Can Reveal
Exploring one of our recent successes is a great way to understand how full-cycle tracking reveals usable insight that allows us to increase your ROI on marketing campaigns. In a recent example, we worked with Jersey Mike’s sandwich company to promote new franchises and increase foot traffic in the stores.
We used data insights to generate pay-per-click marketing campaigns to address awareness needs in the earliest stages of the marketing cycle. We also created social marketing promotions that drove results at the advocacy stage in the buyer’s journey. With our multi-prong approach, we were able to achieve a 76% conversion rate while increasing Facebook engagement by 140%.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Data Tracking
As you begin connecting marketing analytics in your campaign strategies, you’ll want to avoid common mistakes such as working in silos or focusing too much on vanity metrics. Companies must also make sure to pay careful attention to using the best practices for maintaining data privacy in marketing. Avoiding data tracking mistakes is easier when you work with professional marketing teams.
Best Tools for Full-Funnel Customer Data Tracking
Discovering these top tools for full-funnel customer data tracking helps you stay up-to-date on the strategies we might use for your company’s marketing campaign.
•GA4- The latest version of Google’s web analytics service places a greater focus on event-based tracking and provides updated features such as enhanced privacy protections.
•HubSpot- This AI-powered contact relationship platform helps put information in one place for better alignment among sales and marketing teams.
•Looker Studio- Formerly known as Google Data Studio, you can use this cloud-based data visualization tool to create interactive dashboards and streamline sharing reports.
•Segment- This customer data platform aids in the collection and distribution of data from websites, apps and other digital properties.
•Hotjar- You can use this website analytics tool to gain insight into user behavior using heatmaps, feedback tools and surveys.
•Klaviyo- This marketing automation platform is best known for helping to collect and analyze customer data to increase conversions through personalized messaging campaigns.
Take the Next Step to Create a Customized Analytics Strategy
Full-cycle tracking allows you to create highly effective marketing campaigns that customize brand messaging to meet customers where they are in their journey.
Want help connecting your marketing data? Contact Semgeeks for a customized analytics strategy that drives results.
