How To Use Predictive Analytics In Marketing And Sales

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics is data collection, data interpretation, machine learning, and predictive modeling, all with the purpose of figuring out where to put your money so that it drives sales.

Using predictive analytics allows you to learn from what has worked and what hasn’t in the past. It’s a way for you to interpret data and use that for the benefit of your company The data that you collect is there for you to learn from. You should be collecting it, analyzing it, interpreting it, and using it to make better decisions in your marketing and sales strategy!

How Predictive Analytics Helps Your Marketing Strategy

Predictive analytics helps you to better understand multi-touch attribution. It helps you understand the different touch points that led a customer to buy from you. Knowing the steps your customer took in order to get to the buying stage is crucial to your marketing and sales strategy. It can help you identify what has worked and what you should continue doing in your marketing strategy. 

Predictive analytics helps you determine how much credit to give to each part of your marketing funnel. By using predictive analytics, It can show you what is most likely going to lead to closing a deal. 

For example, if someone was emailed a piece of content that led them to visit your blog, which then led them to visit one of your products, which then led them to buy,  You can then know which steps your customer took to get to the buying stage. Knowing this allows you to give credit to the email you sent, some credit to your blog, and some credit to the product page on your website. It’s all about tracking human behavior, you’ll want to test every touch point to really narrow in on what’s getting people to buy.

While you are tracking your customer’s buying journey, you should make a predictive model based on all your research. This prediction can help you establish an idea of where your customers start their journey and end their buying process in your funnel. 

It’s interesting how you can essentially map backward and find out which marketing plays got them into the funnel and which got them to close.

Predictive analytics will show you things like where all new business is coming from and where all closed deals are coming from, whether it be social media or email newsletters, or whatever it may be.

3 Tips To Help You Get Started With Predictive Analytics

1. Google Analytics has a 90-day window decay model that can give you a kick-start to implementing predictive analytics into your marketing and sales strategies. It will help point you in the right direction.
2. You should consider affiliate marketing. You can set people up as affiliates and even give them a custom landing page. Google Analytics also has a system to help you do this well.
3. Don’t forget about data cleanliness. It seems like the majority of the work is building the data structure and cleaning the data.

What Should Your Tech Stack Look Like?

You might be wondering what platforms to use in order to make your predictive models. You really need a combination of a few technologies, many of which you probably already work with.

Here’s a list of some options to incorporate into your tech stack:

• Google Analytics
• Adobe
• Oracle Netsuite
• Salesforce
• Hubspot
• Marketo
• Eloqua

As you can see, you should be using a range of technologies from CRMs to email service providers to analytics software, etc.

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