We’ve entered a new era of predictive analytics. The rise of big data and artificial intelligence has paved the way to a significant quantity of data being available to companies, providing far deeper insights into their prospects and clients than ever thought possible.
It’s a “gold mine” of information, but are companies really taking advantage of it?
Here are some essential steps that boosts your ROI and makes marketing your sales department’s most trusted ally.
Firmographics
Standard CRM platforms allow marketers to segment companies based on industry, size, geo location, or job title etc. While important, this does not provide enough information to efficiently target the right audience. Applications of firmographic are needed to help marketers better identify their audience and increase campaign efficiency through B2B marketing, competitive intelligence, and industry and market studies.
Marketing scoring
Since marketing automation became mainstream, marketers have added prospect and client scoring and behaviour to firmographics.
Although this represents a good step forward, we’re still noticing two major weaknesses:
- It emphasises digital and social actions that happen at the top and mid of the funnel with very little integration of bottom of the funnel actions such as tele nurturing or mini events that help pipeline progression.
- Due to insufficient knowledge and system integration during the final stages of the customer journey, scoring is outweighing the importance of digital and social. This issue is generating serious frustration for marketers who have seen very limited opportunities and sales materialise despite huge volumes of digital leads.
Buyer (or purchase) intent
Advanced analytics are being used to acquire, process and interpret vast volumes of the target audience’s information and online behaviour. By tracking identified “signals”, it is possible to:
- Understand where the targeted audience are in their buying cycle
- Build the right tactics and messages to attract their attention and convert them into buyers
Buyer intent represents a major step forward in overall ROI achievement, but too often we see the information mistakenly kept separate from the main CRM data. This process can be much more effective if matched with known audience and profiles available in systems.
Propensity models
Companies now have a reasonable amount of data on their leads, either as opportunities or sales-generated, however what’s essential is to structure the data in a way that creates propensity models.
You can find algorithms able to provide reasonable expectations of how many leads, opportunities and sales you can generate by any chosen factor – i.e. industry or job title etc.
These models are essential in setting up campaign targets, but also to optimise efforts and resources by further prioritising actions that are more likely to generate stronger results. This is where predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence is going to play a crucial role in the future of demand generation.
Companies that understand the full potential of these analytical tools, invest correctly in the right partners, and implement the right marketing strategy will no doubt set their business on a new course. A bolder one that discovers new forms of generating ROI and keeps their business in front of the pack.
