What is Predictive Analytics & How Can it Help My Marketing Strategy?

As the access to and use of digital resources and platforms rise, consumers are making their buying desires and needs known more than ever before. Today, competing brands aren’t merely competing with each other. Consumers are looking for personalised products and solutions, which means brands are now in a position where they have to decide what offers will be the most profitable in terms of its appeal to customers. Predictive analytics offers marketers the chance to anticipate customer needs, while also forecasting what marketing efforts will generate the greatest ROI. 

Drive Profitable Results by Asking the Right Questions 

Predictive analytics can help marketers and analysts achieve many different things in their marketing strategies to reach different goals. Brands no longer have to only rely on past marketing performances and historical data as an indicator of what strategies to implement going forward. 

With the right software tools, marketers can discover more about their audience and segment specific products to particular customers. Not all of your customers will respond to your marketing efforts in the same way, so predictive analytics identifies trends within varying marketing channels that form a deeper segmentation of your customer base. This enables a certain refinement to take place, which tailors marketing strategies according to the audience you’re targeting.    

Software tools that employ predictive modelling, for example, will enable you to evaluate customer behaviour, so that you can draw correlations between demographics and buying habits. Lead modelling, on the other hand, can show you which of your leads are likely to convert to sales. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to put automated responses in place that will retain those leads and subsequently ensure their conversion. 

The insights drawn from predictive analytics are valuable because they help companies acquire and increase their customers by learning who your products or services will appeal to, while also retaining customers by learning why certain leads did not convert and what you could do to prevent that from happening in the future. 

These metrics and insights are mostly used by mid-level directors or managers to implement small marketing changes that may improve marketing segmentation or the automation of responses within certain marketing channels. But there are other metrics and insights regarding the scaling of ROI that are arguably more powerful and impactful on a C level, which predictive analytics can also obtain. 

The insights and metrics in question are primarily of interest to large-scale companies where there is an abundance of data and resources to glean information from. Although buying habits and consumer demographics are important to evaluate, C-level directors are interested in the insights from predictive analytics that will help their corporations increase their marketing ROI with marketing analytics — and consequently also their total revenue and sales. 

B2C companies predominantly view their marketing and sales as the same thing, whereas B2B companies often still utilise marketing and sales as two separate entities. C-level companies therefore utilise predictive analytics because it improves marketing to such an extent that it increases marketing ROI and, by extension, also increases sales. 

Predictive Analytics Unlocks the Power of Your Data

At a C level, predictive analytics helps marketers and directors predict the future of their marketing investments, so that they can see what will accelerate their marketing ROI ahead of time. Parallel to this, predictive analytics also enables companies to shorten their marketing cycles.  

Today, most companies map out their marketing budgets and strategies on a yearly or quarterly basis. But with predictive analytics, companies can map out and visualise their marketing efforts on a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis. This means that companies don’t have to rely on historical data or past performances to learn if certain marketing efforts may or may not work, because predictive analytics will supply insights that foretell the answer. 

The use of predictive analytics in this way consequently demonstrates which of your marketing efforts and channels are profitable in a much faster capacity. This entirely changes the method in which large corporations can evaluate and build theirmarketing analytics strategies.   

Moreover, instead of assigning a fixed yearly or quarterly budget assigned to certain marketing efforts, companies will be able to approach their marketing strategies, investments, and operations in a more agile manner where substantial changes are implemented according to what the predictive analytics foresees in real-time. 

Ultimately, predictive analytics equips corporations with insights that increase the rate at which impactful business decisions that pertain to marketing and sales are made. This in turn also hastens a company’s route towards increased marketing ROI.

Following a Valuable Plan

At Proof Analytics, we employ predictive analytics tools to provide our clients with insights on how to amplify their marketing ROI. Our software seeks to answers business questions within C-level tiers such as the examples below:

  • How do we increase sales?
  • What drives sales?
  • What spend will increase my revenue within marketing or within sales?
  • Which marketing channel drives the most revenue?

Our technology allows us to ask these kinds of questions while considering all of the factors that could influence the answers. This includes variables like time frames, regions, marketing channels, and product categories. 

With our predictive analytics stack, we consider all of these factors and the way they could influence revenue and sales even before an enterprise decides to invest in a particular marketing effort or channel. 

Take a look at this example: A large aerospace conglomerate enlisted Proof to solve the sales and marketing problems that they were struggling to crack. One particular issue was that they were going to market with product silos and they needed to sell more to the same customer in the same deal in order to drive profitability.  

An important outcome from the results Proof’s analytics delivered was that the company was spending millions of dollars on trade shows with very little impact in terms of lead conversion. With Proof’s guidance, the company cut their trade show expenses in half so that they could still be present at the shows, but use it to increase customer success rather than lead generation.  

Consequently, our insights helped them make the right decisions between marketing and sales that drove a 32% expansion in the number of large deals the company obtained. 

Watch the video here where Proof’s CEO, Mark Stouse, talks about learning where to invest your marketing spend to drive bigger, profitable deals.

Proof Analytics leverages all of an enterprise’s structured and unstructured, as well as online and offline data, to make predictions of the performance of their marketing investments and activities in the future. We unlock the power of what insights your data can predict and by collecting, measuring, and understanding it. 

In this way, we accelerate the profitability and speed at which marketing initiatives are implemented or altered and demonstrate the results to C-suites and marketing leaders alike. 

If you would like to learn more about how you can optimise your marketing ROI in a similar way, book a demo with us today.