What is Marketing Analytics ?

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What is Marketing Analytics? 

The field of analytics in general has been rising throughout the past decade. More specifically, marketing analytics as its own segment of work has been growing as well. Analytics involves using numbers and big data to solve problems or to provide insights within a company.

The Types of Analytics

There are three main types of analytical outcomes, descriptive, prescriptive and predictive. These outlooks all have applications within marketing. Descriptive analytics uses existing data to describe and analyze the results to better understand a marketing campaign or sale outcome. Prescriptive analytics seeks to put reasonable expectations on possible outcomes to theoretically highlight an ideal decision and streamline decision making. Finally, predictive analytics purpose is in the name. This branch of analytics uses existing data to attempt to predict a variety of things including customer response or unit sales. Analytics can also be used to increase efficiency within production lines at a factory, or to assist in hiring patterns. Marketing analytics seeks to take big data from primary and secondary sources and incorporate it into the marketing and overall corporate strategy of the company.

Big data is being incorporated into nearly every fields of business, increasing both awareness and demand for those who understand its current uses and future potential. Given the reality of marketing analytics beginning to intertwine with traditional marketing departments it is important for technically focused analytics experts to work closely with those in the standard functions of marketing to create a group with unified goals.

Kinds of Marketing Analytics Jobs

When looking for a job within the marketing analytics field, job titles will not often be labeled as simply “marketing analyst”. One should widen their search beyond that term and search for jobs with the title of “data scientist”, “business analyst”, or “market researcher”. Each company will have different terminologies to refer to the field, but many of these jobs will hold the same characteristics and be looking for people with the same skill sets found in those majoring in marketing analytics. Marketing analytics is a field of study and combination of disciplines as opposed to a specifically defined role in an organization.

  Figure 1 obtained from