Dive Brief:
- Research from the Winterberry Group, Interactive Advertising Bureau and the DMA found that 49.3% of marketing and media executives pointed to predictive analytics as the most important technology for achieving value from future data, as reported by eMarketer.
- Other technologies cited by the study’s respondents include cross-channel measurement and channel attribution (40.6%), campaign management via segmentation and audience selection (34.8%) and marketing automation/rules-driven decision making and messaging (34.1).
- Separate research from Rocket Fuel found that 78% of U.S. senior marketers see understanding marketing technology as an important skill, trailing only creativity (79%).
Dive Insight:
Managing marketing technology and the massive amount of data collected by digital marketing activities is an ongoing challenge. Many are struggling to extract meaningful insights that can help drive results.
The importance of predictive analytics for making sense of data in a way that moves the needle can also be seen in the heavy push for artificial intelligence from tech giants like Google, Salesforce, IBM and others. AI technology is an engine that drives predictive analytics, so it’s no surprise that these companies are looking to make AI an integral part of marketing and sales tech.
Marketers are seeing the results. After using predictive analytics to prioritize and forecast its marketing program, software firm New Relic saw an almost 10x lift in top lead conversion.
“As a result of implementing predictive analytics into our sales and marketing stack, the marketing team now has insight into, and can more effectively target, the most valuable personas and segments for greater impact," Baxter Denney, VP of Growth Marketing at New Relic, previously told Marketing Dive.
Illustrating what analytics can offer marketers, research released in August from Regalix found that 60% of B2B marketers attributed sales increases from 11% to 50% to analytics, and research from Clutch and R2integrated released around the same time found that web and marketing analytics tools were the most used marketing technologies, cited by 75% of survey respondents.