The Importance of Predictive Analytics in the Era of Digital Marketing
Predictive analytics is not a new thing in the digital marketing space. Predictive analytics tools analyzing tons of data and converting it into insights to help businesses maximize their revenue. These algorithms are powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, data modeling, and statistical analysis.
Did you know?
What is Predictive Analytics?
Advanced analytics tools collect data from millions of sources. These tools analyze the large set of data and convert it into useful insights for the businesses.
Predictive analytics functions work to predict future trends and give ideas as to how business should tweak their marketing plans and strategy according to these trends. Historical pattern identification and recommendation is the major function of it.
Source: AnalyticsVidhya
This predictive analytics based model follows advanced algorithms to capture the data from structured and unstructured data sources. These algorithms are powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, data modeling, and statistical analysis.
Why is Insightful Data Important for Digital Marketing Campaigns?
The more I learn the crux of the digital marketing landscape, the better I am able to understand the importance of data these days. Today a million companies are running billions of marketing campaigns. But how many of them are successfully driving the campaigns? A few!
The problem is planning the campaign!
Most campaigns are based on the raw data or some third party survey and insights. I always say that campaign planning is a very essential part of digital marketing. All the campaigns should be data-driven and well-researched.
When you know your audience's behavior, intent, interest, and presence, you will be able to design better campaigns. That is why insightful data plays a major role in your campaign success.
How is Predictive Analytics Coming into the Picture of Digital Marketing?
Predictive analytics technology and tools are emerging in the digital marketing space and are changing the way marketers use their campaign and audience data.
This is also one of the hottest digital marketing trends to watch out for.
With predictive analytics based tools, you are now able to make better decisions with the help of AI-enabled algorithms. These algorithms analyze your consumer behavior and share the insights with you to take the right actions at the right time. Do you know:
- Which campaign can perform best?
- What kind of content you should trigger?
- What kind of interest your audience is showing towards your products and brands?
Yes, AI-driven predictive analytics tools are solving all of these challenges and making marketers' lives easier.
The predictive analytics model works on analyzing historical data of your consumers and defines the trends accordingly.
The algorithm understands the audience's behavior and keeps optimizing the campaigns based on the audience's interest in your campaigns.
What are the Benefits of Using Predictive Analytics Tools for Digital Marketing Campaign Planning?
Everyone wants the best ROI and revenue for their businesses.
The latest technologies like AI, ML, predictive analytics, deep learning, and more are going to drive all of the digital marketing operations going forward.
Firms should adopt advanced analytics technology and tools early to get competitive advantages.
Machine learning can have a profound impact on customer experience across every step of the customer journey. Learn more with this marketers guide to artificial intelligence and customer analytics.
Better Content Distribution Based on the Audience Interaction
Usually, we create content that is one-fit-for-all at the top of the funnel. But it doesn’t work when you are looking to acquire the customers. For that, you need some level of customization. That is when predictive analytic helps you, it creates the right content recommendations for the audience based on their past interaction with the content. These tools help you define:
- Whom we should we target
- When to target these people
- Where we should target them, and on which channel
- What type of content to trigger for the audience
It uses a large set of data to recommend the content to the audience based on the demographic data, firmographic data, psychographic data, geographic data, etc.
Predictive analytics tool like Kapost’s does amazing content scoring to increase the effectiveness of your content.
Lead Management, Nurturing, Upselling, Cross-Selling Based on their Historical Behavior
Lead management means handling a lead you received from various marketing campaigns and nurture to convert them into a customer.
- Lead scoring & nurturing: Predictive analytics tools score the leads on various parameters such as how many touchpoints they had with the business before filling out the form on the site, in which consumer journey phase they fall into. Based on that they generate insights on the readiness of the leads for conversion
- Segmentation and targeting: Leads falls into a various categories based on their interaction with the business, based on that these leads should be categorized. Predictive analytics tools help you create well planned digital marketing campaigns to target the right leads with the right channel at the right time when they are ready for purchase
- Upselling & cross-selling: What your customers might be interested in based on their buying pattern. What kind of product they will purchase to add-on their existing setup. All these insights can be generated by a predictive analytics tool to help you find the right product to upsell to the existing customer base.
Predictive analytics tools like Lattice help you in effective lead management and achieve a predictive conversion rate and acquire new customers.
Marketing Campaign Planning and Optimization for Better Results
The predictive analytics mechanism helps you plan better digital marketing campaigns and reduce the risk of campaign failure.
Why? Because all the campaigns are designed and planned based on historical data and insights.
It helps you define the right campaign strategy and best suited messaging based on consumer behaviors with the previous campaigns.
For example, an ecommerce leader like Amazon also plan their digital marketing campaigns based on their data-driven insights, and hence they see significant ROI.
User Data Analytics for Campaign Strategy Planning
Users' data is the key or input that helps the predictive analytics algorithm to work for your business.
- How are users interacting with your business?
- What kind of content are they consuming on your website?
- Which webpages are not performing for your business?
- What content is driving a higher bounce rate?
All these crucial queries can be answered by predictive analysis tools and their marketing intelligence algorithms.
Most of the data today is raw or just a set of alphanumeric characters. These analytics and intelligence tools collect this raw information and turn it into a useful recommendation engine to double your ROI.
How to Start with Predictive Analytics?
You must have a business objective and goal to achieve with predictive analytics to ensure and enable your digital marketing campaign success.
A clear goal must be defined first.
Start with building small models to test with predictive analysis for your digital marketing, such as running advertising campaigns for the content which has the highest audience engagement. See how people interact with this content now. Is it still performing? If not, what changes should you make to it for content success?
Collect the data, keep learning from insights based on user interactions with the campaigns you are running. Implement small changes and keep optimizing your campaigns based on the predictive analysis model you are testing.
You can test some set of queries like
- Which types of activities drive better results?
- What types of buttons are getting a higher number of clicks?
- Which type of device is driving better leads?
- What features of the website are contributing most to audience engagement?
Some amazing tools like Adobe Analytics, MixPanel, Google Analytics, Firebase, AppAnnie are making digital marketers and advertisers' lives easier by providing some high-level insights for the betterment of their marketing campaigns.
Data Inputs for your Predictive Analytics Tools
You can connect your data sources to your predictive analytics tools like:
- Email marketing campaign data
- Advertising campaign data
- Social media analytics data
- Website analytics data
- CRM data
The more data you provide, the better insights you will receive; the more relevant you will be for your audience.
Conclusion
Predictive analytics technology has transformed the whole process we were following for digital marketing. From audience interaction with your brand to churn rate optimization, predictive analytics is a great model to help your business.
These AI and ML-powered tools are generating tons are useful insights and driving success to the early adopters. The businesses which are not leveraging these technologies are more likely to see a lower growth rate in the long-run.