Marketing Operations at Work

Today our Marketing Analytics team lead, Creig Foster, dives into the sexy topic of predictive analytics (PA). Why are we so enamored with PA? One of my students, the Marketing Operations leader at fast-growing software company, captured the essence of why PA is compelling in a recent essay: “I have a better chance of my marketing department growing and my personal relevance moving up the food chain if I can predict the future – plain and simple.” So if that’s the case, why aren’t more marketing leaders actively applying PA in their marketing strategies (particularly in the B2B world)? Perhaps they just don’t yet understand the many PA applications that are available to run their Marketing Operations better. Creig’s aticle  takes some of the mystery out of the magic of predictive analytics. Gary

Increasing the Value of Marketing Operations with Predictive Analytics

by Creig Foster

A recent blog post by James Kobielus of Forrester Research advances the idea that business success depends on your company’s capability to see likely future outcomes and take appropriate steps now to realize them. He goes on to say that predicting future scenarios successfully, laying plans and deploying the needed resources is critical in seizing opportunities, minimizing threats and mitigating risks. I fully support this view and believe that for a company to be successful these days it must use predictive analytics to its fullest extent.

So what is Predictive Analytics? From the all knowing source, Wikipedia, “Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics, data mining, and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.” You might ask yourself what is the big deal; humans do this sort of thing all the time. Yes, but predictive analytics takes in huge amounts of data, analyzes complex interrelationships, and discerns patterns in the data that the human mind could not possibly see. Besides, the models can do their processing 24/7 without making a mistake.

Kobielus goes on to state that the “grand promise of predictive analytics – still largely unrealized in most companies – is that it will become ubiquitous, guiding all decisions, transactions, and applications.” For a company (large or small) to become a truly predictive enterprise, I believe it will take more than an investment in the technology and people to accomplish this transition. It also takes a change in how a company thinks about its business.

Instead of a reactive response to challenges and opportunities as they are presented, I believe that a proactive and investigative approach to building the business is enabled by predictive analytics. Yes, I know we all plan with the best intentions of positive outcomes. What I am suggesting is using predictive analytics in making decisions about future directions and strategy. In other words, the use of predictive analytics should become part of the way a company thinks about its business and a cornerstone of the overall business strategy.

Read the complete article here.

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