Predictive analytics harnesses data, so marketers can return to their roots
Predictive analytics is one of today’s hottest B2B marketing technologies with demonstrable ROI causing more and more marketing organizations to look at predictive analytics as a new, non-negotiable element of their marketing technology stacks.
While it’s still a nascent market, predictive analytics and technology has shown great success at increasing revenue growth. Early adopters have seen compelling, demonstrable ROI from their predictive analytics programs. These early adopter wins are spurring investment from a larger swath of the market, particularly among companies with demonstrated marketing automation success and high volume funnels.
The predictive analytics market for B2B is still in the early market stage of the technology adoption life cycle but rapid growth is anticipated with 36 per cent of high growth companies investing in predictive analytics over the next 12 months.
"One of the defining, hot trends in recent news is B2B predictive analytics," said John Hurley, director of product marketing at Radius. "Buyers are far more self-educated now and many marketers' roles have changed, particularly in the last five to ten years. They have had to go from 'Mad Men' to 'Math Men'."
With marketers having less bandwidth to manage all of the data they receive, and Hurley notes that there are up to 3,700 different technologies, he believes that marketers need help. "Ideally, marketers are going to need more data science skills but the reality is that they don't have them. They need technology to give them their superpowers. What marketers do best is connecting with buyers. New technologies can take care of the data side so marketers can get back to their roots."
In collecting different types of data pieces, companies are able to build more elaborate visual models that help them act in ways that businesses could not get from big data. From CRM to sales, predictive analytics and next generation business intelligence are set to upset the apple cart in a big way.
However, among other things, many still struggle to know how to analyze their total addressable market (TAM) using big data. While some CMOs opt to hire on a major consulting firm to conduct TAM analysis, there is increasingly more choice. By combining CRM data with predictive intelligence, CMOs can analyze their current customer base as well as outside opportunities to identify ideal additions that will result in the strongest options for revenue growth.
"Big data has been a bit deceptive and a lot of blame has been placed on big data," Hurley added. "80 per cent of demand marketers blame data quality for not meeting their lead generation goals while those companies who had great data quality realized it is not data quality but data insights. What they realized is that you can gain or build on your data insights but you need technology to do that."