While all marketers are using predictive analytics, it must be noted that the same must be used for different stakeholders within the business cycle. The customer can be tracked using expected loyalty levels to the product, its lifetime value, the level of churn and the kind of products each segment is expected to purchase in the future. For marketers, the ideal marketing mix or use of channels can be specified using the same. The purchase intent can then be properly gauged and the right audience targeted using digital marketing. The content on websites and apps can be optimized and customized for each customer segment. Even risk can be predicted by tracking probable frauds and recovery. Price may be set accordingly. Operationally it provides us withbusiness intelligence which helps forecast.

With the introduction of inbound marketing in 2005, most marketers abandoned outbound marketing instead making it more effective and not realizing that both are not mutually exclusive. Now with Big data and  predictive sales research solutions, Victoria Godfrey thinks that data-driven campaigns are making outbound marketing more effective and should be an integral part of a company’s marketing effort.  

Just having big data was not enough. Business intelligence for making the right marketing decisions to reach the right audiences was required. Analytics makes this possible by providing reliable information about conversion triggers which assist brands in making effective decisions while implementing outbound marketing strategy. This is not all. Big data analytics also assists in identifying most likely to purchase prospects for its outbound marketing and for building an ideal “customer profile” thereby reducing the time and money involved in researching targets or contacting irrelevant prospects.

The trend is clear. Now with big data and analytics, outbound marketing is highly targeted and not a hit-or-miss exercise of the past. So, don’t write off outbound marketing. Make it more effective by tapping the potential of the available data.

Marketers are increasingly using data analytics to derive business intelligence about the market and their competitors. A management consulting publication has provided us with some methods which will ensure this happens successfully. An internal triad must be developed aligning marketing, analytics and finance. Smart, tough and precise questions must be posed within the team. Smartest possible technology must be bought or developed keeping in mind data integration, optimization functionality of the tool, and its business fit.  Results must be checked for using statistics as well as human gut feeling. Cross functional connections may be developed. Operations must be flexible. Finally, results must be displayed to several stakeholders.

As per business research conducted, organizations which are led from the top by leaders who are digitally savvy, are doing much better than the rest. About a third of companies with annual revenues in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars are digital firms up from a fifth last year. Management consulting giant Gartner conducted this research across the US, UK, Germany and Australia. About seventy percent of respondents answered that top priority for their firms was to imbibe technology in the operations.

Experiential marketing is the way forward as this form encapsulates customer experiences best. Companies often lack that holistic, rounded view about the customer, which can only happen through on the ground experiences.Business consulting giant Cap Gemini has tagged several existing technologies as business innovation towards separate work profiles. Some industries though have been laggards in adopting these technologies and surprisingly, telecom is one such. In fact there exist six stages of digital maturity for firms. Based on level of maturity, depends content across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.