There’s now more data collected about our every interaction in the digital world than ever before. According to a Washington Post story, “brokers use ‘billions’ of data points to profile Americans”. Marketers with access and an understanding of how to use that data can create a distinct, competitive advantage in their ability to provide relevant offers to the right buyers at the right time.
Dealing with data beyond spreadsheets and reporting to actionable insight about customers that enables everything from predictive analytics to truly automated marketing automation are some of the promises of what’s next in content marketing for B2B companies. What used to seem like science fiction is now becoming a reality (as shown by the Future of B2B Marketing eBook we created for MarketingProfs).
For more insights into the role of data in the B2B Marketing mix, here are insights and predictions from 3 B2B smarties from some of the top business marketing brands on the web: Marketo, Silverpop (an IBM company) and Lattice Engines.
Predictive Analytics: Right Time & Place
Loren McDonald @LorenMcDonald
Vice President, Industry Relations at Silverpop, an IBM Company
The future of B2B marketing will combine a prospect’s social graph, online behavior, content interactions, demographic and firmagraphic information with scoring, predictive analytics and marketing, content and salesforce automation.
In the future, explicit and implicit data will be fed into a predictive analytics engine to score prospects based on authority, influence, vendors used, interactions and relationships.
When a prospect signs up for a white paper or Webinar, for example, explicit and implicit data will be fed into a predictive analytics engine that will score the prospect on authority, influence, vendors used, content they’ve interacted with, relationships with your company, etc.
The analytics engine then will feed the content and marketing automation engine that delivers each content type in the channel the prospect is most likely to engage.
Complete B2B Predictability
Amanda Maksymiw @amandamaks
Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines
Predictability is what is next in the world of B2B marketing.
Marketers are already able to use sophisticated machine learning and data science techniques to identify which customers are most likely to churn, which prospects are most likely to buy and which products to pitch to existing customers.
With time, this will expand to all aspects of marketing and marketers will be able to predict which content will perform best, which channels will convert the most, and which campaigns will be the most successful.
Big Data: Future of Marketing Automation
Jon Miller @jonmiller
VP of Marketing and Co-founder at Marketo
Marketing automation today is primarily about tracking email and website behaviors, and then running email campaigns based on that behavior (e.g., lead nurturing).
In the future, marketing automation will use big data and analytics to predict the right action to take at any time.
In the future, marketing automation will get (big) data from numerous sources, including mobile/location, social streams, and connected devices. It will use analytics to predict the right action to take at any time.
And it will let companies interact with customers and prospects over various channels including email, but also mobile push, ad retargeting, personalized websites, custom social audiences, and more.
Thank you Loren, Amanda and Jon! I can’t wait to see their presentations at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston later this week. Don’t worry, if you aren’t able to make it to #MPB2B, you can see what you missed with on-demand access here.
For more futuristic B2B Marketing insights, there’s a handy eBook for that: Future of B2B Marketing eBook. Inside you’ll find a mix of B2B marketing predictions that range from the practical to those that are so far out there, they’re literally science fiction.
How are you incorporating big data into your B2B marketing programs?
Photo: Shutterstock
