The importance of using data to improve your marketing efforts is growing. Marketing analytics is helping a wide range of industries better understand their consumers and deliver more personalized experiences.
Digital transformation can affect every aspect of a business, including how it operates, customer experience, training core team members, and acquiring new talent. It’s much more than just integrating advanced technologies, particularly when it comes to your customer journey.
More than 60% of businesses use automation in some way, so to remain competitive, you’ll need an effective digital marketing strategy that relies on using customer data and segmentation to make more informed marketing decisions. With so much historical data available, more and more marketers are turning to predictive marketing.
While the technology may seem daunting to some marketing teams, this guide to predictive marketing will show you the practical capabilities and benefits you can realize utilizing its concepts and tools.
Predictive marketing basics: Data-driven strategy
In a nutshell, predictive marketing involves using data science and analytics to decide which marketing strategies and techniques are most likely to succeed. It uses big data, data mining, statistical modeling, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and other assorted processes to develop accurate forecasts of customer behavior.
Since this new technological crystal ball can look into the future more reliably than previous data-driven methods, it can provide marketers with actionable ways to save and earn money. At the same time, it can also cater to valued customers even more effectively, driving new responses and identifying cross-sell opportunities.
There are many benefits of predictive marketing:
- It takes the guesswork out of marketing and allows companies to do more accurate forecasting.
- It largely removes the need for data scientists to interpret the results and gives marketers the power to work with datasets themselves.
- Predictive marketing tools enable companies to take marketing data and make accurate predictions about when customers will make purchases, how they will do it, and how much they’ll spend.
- It better arm marketers with the insight they need to promote desired customer behaviors through improved messaging.
- It better prepares companies for shifts in market conditions.
Predictive marketing also caters to increasingly sophisticated consumers who do more online with their mobile devices and expect more speed, relevance, and personalization from the brands and organizations they interact with.
Potential predictive marketing channels
The ways that organizations use predictive marketing are almost endless, whether it’s retailers forecasting inventory requirements or hotels predicting the number of guests checking in on any given night, helping them maximize occupancy and revenue.
Examples of predictive marketing channels include:
- Mobile: Since a rising number of consumers are shopping via mobile devices, predictive technologies can provide insights and customer recommendations via mobile apps or browsers.
- Web: With predictive marketing tools, a static, impersonal landing page can be transformed into a dynamic, personalized online experience. Sites can make product or service recommendations in real-time, helping to up the conversion rate.
- Email: By analyzing consumers’ shopping histories, engagement with previous email campaigns, and buying patterns of similar customers, predictive marketing technologies can deliver specific email recommendations. These might include addressing abandoned shopping carts and post-purchase campaigns.
- Research: Examining past marketing campaigns, predictive technology can help provide highly developed research intelligence to follow what works and what doesn’t for individual customers, thus improving their marketing strategy and providing even more personalized solutions.
- Advertising: Advertising lives and dies with market research and performance metrics. Predictive technology can take data from different sources and segment it into specific demographics and special interest groups. Ad agencies can use the information to create personalized ad pitches that better persuade individual customers.
6 ways every team could use predictive marketing
Marketing goals can range from stopping customer churn and providing a better understanding of certain segments’ or individuals’ buying behaviors to building better omnichannel shopping experiences. In every case, there’s a predictive marketing solution to give you a better chance of success. The following are just some of the uses of predictive intelligence available to marketers today.
Prevent customer churn
When customers end a relationship with a business, it can represent a loss of income and the expense of acquiring new customers, which is usually more costly than retaining existing ones. For example, a telecommunications company like Xfinity might use churn prevention to predict which customers will give up their accounts and why they’ll do it.
By leveraging the power of big data with predictive technology, the telecom might be better able to head off disgruntled users before they leave with proactive marketing and customer service.
Build stronger brand loyalty
Customers are well aware when they’re treated as an individual as opposed to a number. Predictive tools allow marketing teams to create personalized experiences that help build brand loyalty. For example, streaming video services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime develop close bonds with their audiences. They can keep customers around by knowing their tastes and feeding them personalized viewing suggestions, as well as using their viewing habits to acquire or make new content.
If your brand doesn’t have the expertise in-house to take advantage of new customer-relationship technologies, it’s possible to add new talent or create teams. Upwork offers the independent help you need through the world’s work marketplace.
Create content tailored to user interests
With the rise of content marketing as an essential piece of many businesses’ sales funnels, predictive marketing helps display content customized for specific audiences. Predictive models help marketers anticipate reader interests rather than just pumping out generic content.
By analyzing user data, predictive intelligence can discern user intent, feeding them content tailored to their interests and their specific place in the buyer’s journey.
Anticipate your audience’s preferences and behaviors
Companies can use predictive intelligence to forecast client needs based on past behaviors, insights from their demographic, and other factors. Rather than sifting through the data slowly, the technology does it with blinding speed, searching through analytics for any shifts in customer behavior so that it can adjust personalized messages.
For example, if a customer buys a snow shovel from a hardware store, predictive intelligence might also query if they need road salt or push deals on snowblowers, with promotions explaining how easy they make winter chores. The algorithms can match customers with products they’re likely to want, avoid promoting products they’re likely to return, and detect which customer segments should be added or deleted from marketing campaigns.
Improve sales forecasting
Sales forecasting is essential to a company’s planning, allowing it to predict revenue and allocate resources as needed. Predictive marketing tools enable a business to analyze seasonal demand for a product or service, prior sales history, and other factors to make realistic forecasts for item demand over the short, medium, and long term.
For example, with intelligent predictive tools, a power utility company can better forecast demand for energy, making preparations to supply it and apply surge pricing.
Build better omnichannel experiences
In today’s interconnected world, it’s not enough to connect to a customer through one channel—a website or a brick-and-mortar store. Marketers need to reach consumers through all their preferred touch points, including social media, mobile devices, email, and more.
Predictive analytics can help combine all the different channels in a smooth, seamless way, creating a holistic shopping experience. Another important emerging area is social analytics. Predictive intelligence can correlate data from a business’s website with third-party data from other sources, such as social media, with dynamic results. For example, it can match a customer’s purchase of a product with their comments on social media, providing valuable insights about the product and the marketing channel.
Find top predictive marketing professionals
Predictive marketing is about knowing your customer better than they know themselves, so you can build personalized experiences that create lasting bonds and convert their interest into sales.
More and more businesses understand the necessity of embracing predictive marketing tools and models to keep a competitive edge and meet consumer expectations of increased service tailored to their specific needs.
Properly understanding and implementing predictive marketing technology requires a business to access the expertise demanded by this fast-growing field. With Upwork, you can hire in-demand independent talent with the skills you need to ensure that your new marketing venture is the success you had hoped and predicted it could be.
