19th Apr 2017

What Is Predictive Analytics and How Marketing Companies Use It

How Marketing Companies Use Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is a form of advanced analytics that extracts data from existing data set and uses statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to forecast future activity, behaviour and tendencies. Predictive analytics is a great tool for marketing companies because it allows vendors to have an accurate prediction of what behaviours a consumer will exhibit. These forecasts are utilized to develop the most effective marketing approaches offering the greatest likelihood of reaching desired results. It also predicts what might occur in the future with an acceptable level of reliability, and includes what-if scenarios and risk assessment

When big data is used in conjunction with predictive analytics it can be very beneficial for businesses. It gives them the opportunity to gain insight into the hive mind of the consumer and allows them to tailor their services, products and marketing strategy to their demographics behaviour. Predictive analytics are used by marketing companies to determine customer responses or purchases, as well as promote cross-sell opportunities. And these are some other ways predictive models are used by marketing companies for their client’s success.

  1. Determining Product fit

Predictive Analytics help in preparing a scope of customers’ market need and helps listen to customers’ feedback to ascertain where the need exists and doing this becomes far easier when marketing companies are armed with the demographic, behavioural, and psychosomatic data of different clients.

 

  1. Improving Customer Intelligence

Marketing database does not usually contain all customers’ information. By applying predictive analytics in marketing, marketing companies merge customers’ data from other sectors of the organization, such as; sales, finance, tech support, and product to get a versatile picture of the client.

  1. Profiling Best Customers

Access to various rich data about the customers can give an advantage to marketing companies, by performing predictive analysis to figure out the customers that buy the products most and helps create profiles of the best customers. This can also give answers to various demanding questions such as; what journey do they take? How do they become loyal customers? Did they take part in a product trial, what marketing efforts did they answer to, what were the reasons they bought the product? And so on. Predictive analytics is use data to determine what aspects combine to affect the consumer’s behaviour and what conditions must be present to advance the consumer down the sales funnel. The ability to obtain this information is a game changer for marketing companies, never have we had this kind of access into the psyches of consumers. The very customer might not even know what their next most likely move will be.

  1. Optimizing Content and Campaign Channels

As the customer base keeps strengthening, and new customers join the pool of existing customers, Marketing Companies take advantage on the data to study the most appropriate channels, types of content, and even dates and time to target specific audiences.

  1. Delivering Top-notch Quality Prospects to Sales

To up the already competitive sales game, Marketing Companies create a predictive model that will mark their leads. Once they profile their best customers and at the same time piling up information on their prospects’ activities, they can then predict each prospect’s propensity to purchase and then focus their sales team on leads that have a higher likelihood to convert.

 

  1. Reducing Churn and Optimize Loyalty

It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep the ones you have. Since past behaviour is indicative of future behaviour, predictive analytics can also be utilized to help identify clients with high attrition risk. By analyzing the behavioural patterns of unsatisfying customers on the platform, a savvy marketer can identify the warning signs from current customers and either notify the sales partner responsible for managing the customer relationship or automatically plug the candidate into a churn-prevention campaign. Once empowered with this insight, they can use it to take proactive action to retain them. Predictive analytics is a great way to align customers with a sales strategy that caters to their personality.

  1. Improving Content Distribution

Every company is likely to invest a good portion of the marketing budget in quality content. This makes sense because content marketing can provide significant ROI for the company. There is nothing more frustrating than putting a bunch of money into developing content, only to find no one opens or reads it.

Oftentimes, the content itself gets the blame here when the true culprit is an ill-defined scheme for content distribution.