Here we go again.
A group of marketers have come up with yet another indecipherable buzzword.
What is Predictive Intelligence?
The best way to define it is:
“…the process of finding out how consumers react to sales messages and combining those findings with their characteristics. This data is then crunched and an automated strategy developed to get the right communications to the right people to encourage them to buy.”
That means knowing:
- Who your customers are
- How they like to receive sales messages (e.g. image based or text heavy, formal or informal)
- How they read them (social media, email etc.)
- When they read them
The answers give you a map to show what to send to whom, when and which channels to use.
Basically, it’s an automated system that uses customer insight data to deliver targeted marketing.
What’s the proof it works?
Good question.
Research firm Aberdeen Group conducted a survey of 123 financial service companies. They discovered that those using Predictive Intelligence achieved an 11% increase in the number of clients they secured in the previous 12 months. Plus, a 10% increase in the number of new client opportunities.
Forbes Insights surveyed 306 executives from companies with $20 million or more in annual revenue and discovered that 86% of those using Predictive Intelligence for at least 2 years increased their ROI as a result.
But it’s not just number crunching and automatic action based on hard data. Now, with improvements in the analysis of unstructured data, there is a move towards more fluid Predictive Intelligence that also takes into account emotions that drive behaviours. This combination of big data and social science delivers highly relevant results.
Are you using it?
Already used in the B2B sector, it’s likely Predictive Intelligence will be increasingly common in the B2C world too. With more and more PI companies emerging offering reasonably priced PI software packages it might be something worth looking at to give your marketing strategy the edge in 2016.