How to Conduct a Marketing Analysis

What is a marketing analysis?

A marketing analysis is a process that helps you understand the various demographics and segments of your target audience. It also shines light on effective engagement strategies, the customer journey and better ways to successfully convert leads. Conducting a marketing analysis can help you improve your marketing campaigns and drive a better return on investment (ROI) for your marketing budget. It can also help you build brand awareness, customer loyalty and generate more leads.

“Marketing analysis determines the success and failure of marketing campaigns,” said Esther Poulsen, CEO of Raare Solutions. “It is necessary to build customer engagement programs with the expectation of what the results should be, and then conduct a detailed analysis to determine if results were achieved, exceeded or failed.”

How do you conduct a marketing analysis?

1. Determine your goals.

Before performing an in-depth marketing analysis for your business, you need to be clear about what you want to get out of it. Setting goals will help shape your analysis and determine relevant methods and metrics; the intention can be measuring and improving marketing ROI, seeing conversion or click rates, finding ways to better target new and existing customers, or simply identifying what is working and what isn’t in your current marketing strategy.

2. Understand your target audience.

In order to run a successful marketing campaign, you need to identify your target audience. Also, you must get to the core of who they are and what they need. That means taking the time to study current customers and potential new ones. Understanding your customers’ demographics can provide insights into their purchasing behavior, the most effective channels to reach them and what kind of messaging will resonate.

The best way to get to know your customers is by talking to them. You can employ methods like polls, surveys and focus groups. Refer to comments from users on your social media pages and online reviews. Alternatively, you can tap into your social platforms’ analytics tools to better understand your audience’s behavior on social media. Or, you can leverage data from some of the excellent tools listed in the following section.

3. Collect relevant data.

The purpose of your marketing analysis will help you determine which data you need to collect. A lot of that information will come from researching your target consumers. Beyond that, you’ll need to take a look at other metrics; such metrics include lead generation and conversion rates, revenue, expenses, search engine ranking, response rates and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

Use a SWOT analysis to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your business — from both a marketing standpoint and a general operations perspective. Also consider using marketing analytics tools to help collect and analyze key data.

4. Study external players.

Beyond examining your own marketing campaigns, tracking industry trends and studying what your competitors are doing is vital. Getting a global view of your industry will provide useful insights, including the types of consumers you should be targeting and the kind of messaging that proves most effective.

Also keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing efforts; see who they are targeting and on what channels. Evaluate their style of communication and the level of customer engagement their efforts generate. Based on their hits and misses, you’ll know where to direct your efforts. Plus, understanding how to differentiate your product from the competition allows you to communicate to consumers why you are a better choice.

5. Take action.

Once you’ve collected and analyzed all the relevant data, it is time to take action. That could mean anything from tweaking the tone of your marketing communications to launching entirely new campaigns aimed at demographics that go beyond your traditional target audience.

What tools should you use to conduct a marketing analysis?

Additionally, there are lots of tools out there to improve your marketing analysis and the insights it reveals. Here’s a look at some of the most useful tools available to businesses:

• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an SEO tool that allows you to analyze your existing content and optimize new content before deploying it. An SEO tool is key to improving your rankings for search engines like Google and Bing, ensuring that more users find you when querying relevant keywords and phrases.
• Crazy Egg: Useful for website analytics, Crazy Egg can help you identify which users are coming to your website and from where. This tells you which members of your audience are encountering your external marketing efforts and have enough interest to search for or click through to your website.
• Google Analytics: Few tools for understanding the source and behavior of web traffic are as ubiquitous as Google Analytics. It can show you how users find your website and what they do once they visit it. This high-level view can help you identify the reasons users leave your website. This way, you can increase the time they spend on pages and optimize the elements you want them to interact with. Best of all, Google Analytics is free.
• Semrush: Semrush is an SEO tool that enables you to optimize your online content and examine how you stack up against the competition. It offers a variety of pricing packages for businesses of all sizes. Plus, it can scale with your company as you grow and continually reevaluate your marketing needs.
• SpyFu: SpyFu excels at tracking your competitors’ performance in online advertisements and search engine rankings. This practice helps you establish targets to surpass them. Your marketing efforts don’t happen in a vacuum; information on what your competitors are doing can help you outrank them or do something unique to cut through the clutter.

What should be included in a marketing analysis?

For a marketing analysis to be truly comprehensive, it has to examine every relevant aspect of your marketing efforts. At minimum, you should include these elements in your business’s marketing analysis:

Leads and prospects

This part is especially important to marketing campaigns designed to drive new business. Examining leads and prospects helps you understand where you source potential new business and how you keep them engaged with your brand. A marketing analysis can identify better ways to nurture these leads — pushing them along your conversion pipeline toward a buying decision.

Conversions

Conversions refer to any decision you want to influence an audience member to make; that action can be opening an email, clicking on an advertisement or engaging with your social media accounts. Though converting a lead or prospect into a paying customer is the most common reference, sales are not the only type of conversion a marketing campaign is after. Keep your goals and KPIs in mind to identify what conversions are most important to you in a given campaign.

Audience

A marketing analysis should also shed light on the needs of your audience, including how your products or services meet those needs and how they do not. The more demographic information you can gather on your audience, the better you can segment your audience. Plus, you can target each segment with the type of content most likely to drive conversions.

“The more a brand knows about the people that are interested and not interested in a product or service, the greater opportunity for conversion,” Poulsen said. “It also ensures that an organization is investing in the right type of customers. Finally, it allows the marketer to talk to the consumer on their terms and how they want.”

Engagement

Once you understand your audience, you can tailor your brand messaging and various marketing campaigns to drive engagement. A marketing analysis examines your audience’s current engagement with your brand through metrics like email open rate, click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate.

Your analysis should also consider how users behave after engaging with your content. For example, when a user clicks on a paid advertisement that brings them to your landing page, what do they do next? When you understand the reasons behind these metrics, you can improve them by optimizing your marketing campaigns to intrigue your audience and encourage further engagement.

Industry overview and competitive landscape

Getting the lay of the land through a competitive marketing analysis of your industry is critical — this way, you can tailor your strategy to the market. You should understand not only market growth and other industry trends, but also how you stack up against your competitors. A competitive marketing analysis allows you to understand your company’s position compared to a direct or indirect competitor.

“A basic overall industry overview [includes] the size, trends and projected growth,” said Anthony Money, a digital marketing specialist at Qualified Online Traffic. “This is focused more on the industry as a whole and not your business or your customers. Is the industry growing, higher/lower demand, more/fewer competitors, new tech/products/services, etc.?”

When you conduct a marketing analysis, give yourself time to gather sufficient data on each of these points. An abridged marketing analysis often delivers skewed results — or worse, not enough data to draw meaningful conclusions.

“The most common mistake is not allowing enough time to thoroughly collect and analyze your data and findings,” said Kelly J. Waffle, director of research and innovation at CPA Crossings. “Many overlook providing adequate time and thereby limit their findings. This limitation so early in the overall process affects every future strategy and decision that is made.”

How do you write a marketing analysis?

Writing a marketing analysis is an important part of synthesizing the data you gathered into a reviewable format. The way you write your marketing analysis will determine how useful the results are to refining your marketing strategies. Here’s how you should go about writing a marketing analysis:

Step one: State the purpose of the analysis.

Start off your marketing analysis by setting the expectations for what you hope to achieve at the end of the study. Be sure to explain the ins and outs of your marketing efforts.

“A marketing plan should include a pro forma,” Poulsen said. “In the pro forma, the organization identifies the audience being targeted, timing, amount of marketing campaigns (email, direct mail, digital) and the investment that will be made in the program.”

Step two: Provide an overview of the landscape.

Before getting into the details, provide more information about your target audience. Here, you can discuss demographics as well as other relevant points, e.g., past purchasing information or consumer needs in general.

Also give an overview of what is going on in the industry, focusing on the efforts of your competitors. Mention groups they are targeting, channels they are using, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Step three: Discuss the data.

A marketing analysis should explain what data is relevant to the analysis and how you plan to collect and measure it. The data that will inform your conclusions can be anything from insights taken from conversations with your customers to ROI on specific ads.

Be sure to include specific KPIs to measure the success or failure of certain strategies. For example, if you run an email marketing campaign with the goal to increase engagement, your KPIs could be the open rate, click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate. Similarly, if you are reviewing a content marketing campaign, your KPIs might include rankings on page one of Google, user time on page and CTR on embedded calls to action.

Set benchmark goals for each KPI and then track them during your various marketing campaigns. A marketing analysis will reveal how effective these campaigns were in achieving your goals. Remember, not every goal needs to tie directly to sales; sometimes brand awareness and engagement are victories that drive a prospect closer to becoming a customer.

Step four: Analyze the results.

Here is where you explain what all the data points you collected mean for your business. Look at the results and see how they compare to the goals you set.

“This will help to determine if the campaign was successful or did not deliver on the projected expectations,” Poulsen said. “Marketing analysis needs to not only report on the results, but [on] why it worked or did not work.”

Step five: Make recommendations.

Understanding the successes and failures of your marketing campaign is important. But, in order to strengthen future campaigns and grow your business, you’ll need to translate that understanding into concrete recommendations.

You might see that a campaign is mostly successful but could do better by tweaking the messaging or concentrating on specific channels. It’s also possible that you uncover entirely new strategies and target groups. No matter what the analysis reveals, be sure to finish up with actionable steps.

What is the importance of a marketing analysis in a business plan?

Conducting a thorough marketing analysis is an important part of running your organization; it provides useful insights to bolster your business plan. Here are some of the reasons why you should undertake a marketing analysis. It:

• Helps you budget your resources. The biggest benefit of a marketing analysis is that it shows you how to spend your marketing budget in a more targeted, effective manner. You’ll see which types of marketing channels and advertising give you the most bang for your buck. This way, you’ll know where to more effectively invest.
• Lets you better understand your target audience. A good marketing analysis will show you which customers you should be targeting. You’ll also gain a better understanding of where your audience is active and what type of messaging resonates with them.
• Allows you to sell more efficiently. Analyzing the data collected will reveal how past and current campaigns are performing. You’ll see where money has been well spent and which efforts bring in the most sales — allowing you to optimize your strategy as you move forward.
• Provides guidance for the future. You’ll get valuable insights to help plan future marketing campaigns. But, you’ll also get a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs, industry trends and competitor actions. All that information can be used to reveal areas for future innovation and growth.

Overall, a marketing analysis helps you get a clearer picture of how your marketing efforts fit into your company’s operations at large. This way, you can efficiently organize your business.

“It has been said that a big portion of marketing is wasted due to not understanding how well it performs and why,” Poulsen said. “The more analysis and insights obtained, the better the opportunity for future funding of marketing vision, and higher ROI.”

What insights can a marketing analysis provide?

A marketing analysis should help you optimize your future marketing efforts by understanding what works and what doesn’t in your current marketing campaigns. It can provide the following insights for your business.

Understanding ROI

Every facet of a marketing analysis ties back to ROI. For every dollar you spend on marketing, how many sales are you driving? Not every marketing activity is directly tied to sales. But, it should all relate to bringing new leads into your conversion funnel and pushing existing leads closer to a purchasing decision.

“It is essential to determine the ROI of a campaign,” Poulsen said. “The most important ROI to a company is conversion. This is determined by people that participated in a campaign by a pull list, receiving or responding to a message over a channel (direct mail, email, social, digital, media), and determining if the strategy is resulting in an expected conversion or outcome, whether they be leads, sales, or other criteria.”

Understanding your audience

Your knowledge of your audience — the channels they are most active on, their likes and dislikes, and their pain points — should drive your marketing efforts. A marketing analysis can help you better understand your audience and the demographics of its various segments, allowing you to target customers with more effective brand messaging on the right channels.

“In simple words, you want to describe who your ideal client is,” said Money. “What is his/her demographic? What are their interests, their wants, hopes, needs [and] dreams? Where are they (geographically and online through groups, websites, etc.)? This is how we are able to strategically target them.”

Identifying new markets

Your marketing analysis should also identify potential members of your audience you haven’t previously considered. These could be people who need products or services tangentially related to the ones you already offer. Or, they could be those who need your existing products and services for a use case you hadn’t thought to market. This could provide an opportunity for upselling and cross-selling your products or services. In addition to identifying new markets, a marketing analysis should determine the potential growth rate of the market.

Identifying SEO opportunities

As part of your marketing analysis, audit your website and content to identify areas you could improve to build a more successful SEO strategy. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of ensuring the content of your website and social media platforms encourages search engines to rank your pages highly in search results. Ideally, your website will appear on page one of the Google results when your audience searches for keywords and phrases associated with your brand, products and services.

Identifying paid ad opportunities

A marketing analysis should include a review of your paid advertisement campaigns, such as pay-per-click ads. You should not only look for new ways to expand your reach with paid ads, but you should also focus on what you are currently doing and how effective it has been. This can reveal opportunities to optimize your paid advertising spend by tailoring ads to your target audience’s interests — boosting engagement and conversions.

When should you conduct a marketing analysis?

Marketing analyses should be part of ongoing strategic planning and reassessment of your broader business. Depending on your business’s circumstances, you might want to run a marketing analysis on an impromptu basis; this is especially the case if you are considering expanding your offerings.

“The marketing analysis should be tied to the overall strategic behavior of your organization,” said Waffle. “Also, if you are in an emerging market, you may have to conduct a marketing analysis once a year. If you are in a mature market, you may conduct your marketing analysis every two to three years.

“If you are rolling out new products or services, you will want to refresh your marketing analysis. If you are trying to reach a new market or audience, you will want to conduct a new marketing analysis.”

If you’ve never conducted a marketing analysis before, now is the time. A comprehensive and thorough marketing analysis can help you spend your marketing budget in a way that will engage more of your audience and boost conversions. Whether you’re launching a new marketing campaign, releasing a new product, testing new features or trying to optimize your marketing efforts, a marketing analysis is a must if you want to increase your ROI.

Tom Anziano and Mike Berner contributed to this article. ​​Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.