For B2B marketers, the emerging field of predictive analytics has the potential to lead to significantly improved marketing decisions. Predictive analytics is essentially a sophisticated form of data mining that enables companies to predict future probabilities and trends. By discovering predictable patterns among customers and prospects online, for example, companies can optimize the chances that customers will actually buy their products and services.
The first step, of course, is collecting all the data you’ll need to make intelligent marketing decisions. You can think of predictive analytics as being comprised of two different sets of tools – tools for collecting data about customer patterns, and then the algorithmic tools for crunching all this data.
One way of collecting customer behavioral data online is with a marketing tool like SessionCam, which helps you to record customer activity online to understand their behavior. By following customers around on your website, you can find out where they struggle and what you can be doing better to convert them. In some cases, you can even generate a “heat map” to see where they are spending the most time. SessionCam conceptualizes this as a virtual feedback loop, in which each new insight about customer behavior helps you predict the next customer experience even better.
By understanding where customers go – and why – you will be able to predict customer demand for products in your company’s portfolio. You can see where they linger on your site, and where they seem to search for more information. That’s extraordinarily important. After all, the most frustrating aspect of running a B2B company is to create a truly dynamic and groundbreaking product, only to find that customers are struggling to understand the product, or even worse, struggling to purchase it.
A Harvard Business Review study found that big data – the data that goes into predictive analytics packages – is particularly good at predicting demand at the “long tail” of any potential product distribution. Those are typically niche products with very defined customer preferences, tastes and behaviors. Fortunately, those are exactly the types of products that most B2B companies sell.
There’s one other way that predictive analytics can lead to B2B marketing success. Having first-hand knowledge of customers can help you figure out the right types of discounts, promotions and offers that are most likely to move a sales lead through the sales funnel. You might be able to predict, for example, that price discounts don’t really work for your customers, who might be relatively price-insensitive. Or, you might find that seasonal promotions work best. Or you might find out that a specific message just doesn’t resonate the way you thought it would.
The era of predictive analytics is here, and that means the companies that are best able to make sense of all the data out there are the ones who are going to create competitive advantage within their respective industries. It means that your marketing and sales teams can generate only the reports that really matter, and focus only on the leads that have the highest chance of converting later. There are plenty of tools out there, and now it’s time for companies to start leveraging them.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.