What is the first step of analytics planning? Well, the first step of analytics planning is determining your position in the market. It involves analyzing the business. We should look at the market needs to decide the company’s progress. Although it can be a time-consuming process, it is well worth it when you consider all of the rewards.
In this article, We will talk about the step-by-step process of analytics planning to help you start with your planning today.
What Is Analytics Planning?
Analytics planning means collecting and analyzing data for understanding and optimizing business performance. Moreover, It is a cycle that starts with planning, moves to data collection and data analysis, and finally leads to insights and action.
A Step-By-Step Guide To Analytics Planning
In the broadest sense, analytics planning is a method for businesses to generate plans to achieve overall long-term goals. It is contrary to the project planning process, which scopes and assigns activities for individual projects, or strategy mapping, which aids in determining your mission, vision, and goals. The analytics planning procedure has a scope, assisting you in laying out a road map to focus on the key objectives and to set aside the less beneficial initiatives for your firm.
The following are the stages of the analytics planning procedure.
Let’s begin!
Step1-Determine Your Position
Firstly, you need to determine your position in the market. During this preparation phase, you lay the groundwork for all future efforts. You must know where you are to figure out where you need to go and how to get there. Likewise, to get the most out of your project, ensure that the appropriate stakeholders must include in the rest. In particular, talk with executives at your firm, incorporate customer insights, and collect industry and market data to obtain a clear picture of your company’s position in the market and in the minds of its customers to identify fundamental strategic issues.
Mission And Vision Statement
It’s a good idea to create your company’s mission and vision statements to get a sense of what success looks like for your organization.
A mission statement is a precise statement about the company’s purpose. It should clearly state the company’s intentions.
On the other hand, a vision statement is a longer, aspirational description of what the company wants to be known for in the future. It should be comprehensive but still achievable indeed. It should inspire employees and customers to see the company in a new light and be motivated to work towards its goals.
In sum, mission and vision statements should be well thought out and specific. Thus, they help set direction and clarify the company’s goals.
SWOT Analysis
After creating mission and vision statements, you need to use a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis as a framework above all. You may quickly categorize your findings to clarify your present position based on input from executives, consumers, and market data. It also helps to identify potential opportunities for success, which are often related to an organization’s strengths.
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
| Strengths are core competencies because these are the areas where the business excels | The areas that need improvement, placing the company at a disadvantage |
| opportunities | Threats |
| Favorable factors with the potential to improve the current positioning of the company | Factors arising in the external environment that have the potential to hurt the firm’s business |
| Helpful factors | Harmful factors |
PEST Analysis
A pest analysis is, however, a different approach to doing a SWOT analysis. Pest stands for Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, and Technological Analysis. It’s an analytical strategy that identifies hazards and opportunities for your company. Furthermore, as you synthesize all of this information, you’ll be able to define your company’s unique strategic position in the market and begin implementing a few strategic goals.
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Political |
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| Economic |
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| Socio-cultural |
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| Technological |
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Step2-Prioritize Objectives Of Analytics planning
After you have identified your present position in the market, it’s time to establish goals that help you meet your objectives. Besides, Your goals should be in keeping with your company’s mission and vision. Furthermore, You have to prioritize your goals by posing pertinent questions, such as:
- How can I ensure that everyone understands the company’s mission and vision?
- Which of these ideas has the most potential to affect our company mission/vision and improve our market position?
- What are the most significant impacts (such as Client Acquisition VS Revenue)
- What will your competitors do?
- What are the most pressing issues?
- What will it take for us to reach our objectives?
- What should we do to evaluate our success and whether we met our goals?
The following steps will help you get started:
- The First step is to generate a list of objectives. These should be clear and measurable as you may achieve your long-term analytics goals and project outlines.
- Updating web content
- Increasing open rates of email
Smart goals
Smart (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) goals are significant to determine a timeline and identify the resources needed to achieve goals to make your success measurable.
| Specific | Firstly, goals need to be specific to distinguish what success will look like from particular goals. |
| Measurable | Secondly, goals must have a way to quantify success as they can track the progress of the achievements of goals. |
| Achievable | Thirdly, goals should be challenging but doable and not too difficult or impossible. |
| Realistic | Fourthly, realistic goals require an individual to fully understand and complete them with their given resources and skills. |
| Time-bound | Lastly, and most importantly, the time frame of the goals is significant too. In other words, a deadline date is necessary to have a timeline for goal completion. |
Step3-Conduct Analytical Research
Planning analytics is an essential step in any marketing campaign. However, if you lack a solid understanding of your target market, it might be tough to create a successful strategy. To get started, research your target market’s needs and wants. Once you have clarity on their need and want, you might develop creative marketing campaigns that resonate with them. Moreover, notify the methods of data acquisition that are most appropriate for your target market and use them to your advantage. By doing so, you’ll be on your way to successful planning analytics. However, there are two vital steps to keep in mind for this purpose.
Define Your Audience
Defining your audience is one of the most crucial steps in content writing. It helps you understand what your target audience needs. Likewise, if you are skeptical about your target audience, you should conduct some research. Additionally, You might discover more about them by observing them, reading their blogs or articles, or even talking to them directly.
Design For Your Audience
The next step is designing for the audience.
Designing for the audience means you should know everything about the target customer and their preferences. Therefore, you can create content that will satisfy their needs.
Step4-Use Key Performance Indicators KPIs For Planning Analytics
KPIs are metrics to track and measure the success of an organization or business. They are significant in analytics planning because they provide a framework to determine the data collection process. However, to make it easy to understand, we can divide KPIs into two categories:
- Operational KPIs
- Strategic KPIs
Operational KPIs:
Operational KPIs focus on how well an organization performs in its everyday functions, like sales or customer service numbers.
Strategic KPIs:
On the contrary, strategic KPIs help identifies long-term goals and understands how well the company is reaching them.
Keeping track of these matrices will help you better understand your performance and make strategic decisions accordingly. For instance, if you notice that sales are down, you can investigate the cause and take appropriate action to improve performance. Additionally, by understanding key performance indicators (KPIs), you can ensure that your business’s performance is as smooth as possible.
Step5-Diving Into Data Collection Options And Tools
Data collection is the process of gathering data or information. It can be possible through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, and observations.
| Survey | Surveys, most commonly, are applied to collect information from a group of people about their opinions on current issues or past experiences. |
| Interview | An interview, in particular, is a great tool to gather information from one individual at a time and can be done in person or over the phone. |
| Observation | An observation subsequently involves observing what people do without their knowledge of being watched for research purposes. |
| Experiment | An experiment involves testing things to see if they work and how you want them to work, such as trying out different marketing strategies for your business to see what works best for you and your customers. |
Step6-Analyzing Data To Identify Insights
Once you have a clear picture of what’s out there, you can start diving into the details and analyzing trends. Moreover, you can improve your customer experience and grow your business sustainably by understanding how your customers behave. So, get to work and get your hands on all that data!
Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive analytics emphasizes “what happened” in the past. Ideally, you need to analyze the past data that will help in effective visualization. Business applications of descriptive analytics include:
- KPI dashboard
- Monthly Revenue Report
Diagnostic Analytics
Diagnostic Analytics covers the “why did it happen” approach. For this purpose, you need to take insights disclosed from descriptive analytics and drill down to find the cause of those outcomes. Essentially, it creates more connections between data to identify the pattern of behavior. Moreover, companies apply diagnostic analysis as:
- A SaaS Company investigates increased trials of marketing activities
- A freight company drilling down the cause of slow shipments in a specific area
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics attempts to answer the “what is likely to happen?” Unlike descriptive analysis, this type of analytics uses previous data to predict future outcomes. Further, predictive analytics uses summarized data for logical predictions of events. Correspondingly, some examples of predictive analysis are:
- Risk Assessment
- Sales Forecasting
Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics is the frontier of data analysis, combining the insights from all previous analytics to determine the course of action to take in a current problem or decision. Tactfully, an example of an application of prescriptive analytics is:
- Artificial Intelligence AI
Step7-Interpreting Results Of Your Experiments
After analyzing the results of your experiments, the next step is to interpret them. Primarily, it will help you formulate better business decisions. However, be very careful while data interpretation, as incorrect interpretation, can lead to a wrong conclusion. Though, always remember that data is only as good as the analysis that goes into it. For sure, some tools will help you in data visualization:
| Google Charts |
| Tableau |
| Datawrapper |
| Infogram |
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
When designing an analytics strategy, firstly, it is essential to define the goals and objectives of your program first. After that, it is necessary to collect the data and analyze it. By all means, it will allow you to measure your progress. Lastly, demonstrate using KPIs (key performance indicators) to track and monitor your progress.
2. What Are Some Pitfalls To Avoid When Using Analytics Solutions?
There are a few common pitfalls to avoid when using Analytics solutions:
Improper understanding of your data can lead to inaccurate Analytics solutions, consequently. Furthermore, it could involve checking the accuracy of your data sources, understanding what data you’re measuring and how it relates to your business objectives, and ensuring that it is correctly formatted.
Additionally, using too many metrics at once can be a big mistake, as it will overwhelm you with information. When choosing which metrics to measure, make sure to focus on the ones that are most relevant and impactful for your business. It’s also necessary to take the time to understand your users and what problems or needs they have.
3. How To Start Analytics Planning In Your Business?
To begin analytics planning in your business, first, you need to define your goals. After that, you need to collect data. There are many tools to track website traffic, conversions, and more. For instance, Google Analytics or MixPanel are two of the most common options.
4. What Is An Analytics Measurement Plan?
On the whole, an analytics measurement plan is a document that outlines how you will track and measure the success of your website or app’s marketing campaigns. Similarly, the core components of an analytics measurement plan include goals, objectives, channels, metrics, and definitions.
5. What Is The Order Of Steps When Defining a Measurement Plan?
Specifically, the order of steps is to define what you’re trying to measure, identify the relevant data points, develop hypotheses about how changes in your variables might influence outcomes, and collect and analyze the data. You can use Google Analytics to track site traffic trends, user behavior data (such as bounce rates), conversion rates (whether visitors convert into paying customers), etc.
6. What Are Examples Of Analytics?
Nevertheless, analytics help you measure and track the performance of your website, product, or service. In Particular, some common examples of analytics are tracking traffic data, conversion rates, user behavior, etc.
7. What Are Key Analytics?
Nonetheless, when it comes to analytics, there are three main types that an organization can leverage to improve its performance. These three types are namely operational, marketing, and customer experience analytics.
- Operational analytics, above all, refers to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and communication of data to improve an organization’s performance.
- Marketing analytics is, in fact, a broad term that refers to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and communication of data to plan and execute marketing strategies.
- Customer experience analytics refers to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and communication of data to understand and improve customer loyalty, satisfaction, and interactions, particularly.
8. What Is The Purpose of Analytics Planning?
Although analytics Planning helps us collect data, it can also help us analyze and interpret data to make better business decisions. In short, It can include the activities like measuring the performance of your business and marketing campaigns, identifying user trends, and assessing how well your content is performing.
9. Why Is Analytics Planning Important?
Analytics Planning is essential for businesses because it helps in making sound decisions that will help them reach their business goals. For example, data analytics might predict customer behavior and improve overall operations. Furthermore, It can help you measure progress and determine if your campaigns are working as intended.
10. What Is The Value Of Analytics Planning?
Analytics Planning is a powerful tool because it allows businesses to measure the success of their marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement. As a result, you can fine-tune your marketing strategy accordingly and form better customer relationships.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, for effective analytics planning, the first step is determining your position in the market. It will lead you to prioritize objectives and research that will help you know your target audience, for instance. Regarding knowing your audience, you need to collect data. Last but not least, you need to keep analyzing it to identify insights and make informed decisions about the best ways to move forward.