In the age of assistance, delivering growth starts with predicting future by beholding data

As a marketer, chances are you’ve used consumer insights to understand what your customers want and then delivered relevant experiences to them. But have you ever used intent signals to predict what your customers want? Today, marketing technology allows you to do just that.

The reality is the customer journey is nothing short of dynamic. As the journey continues to shift and change shape, it’s becoming harder for marketers to make sense of all the consumer intent signals people leave behind. Because as people look for what they need, they switch between channels and devices. They may conduct a research and saw the journey of the customer from start to end.

Marketers have had to navigate these twists and turns by juggling first- and third-party data, probabilistic modeling, or remarketing. But all of that manual juggling simply won’t cut it. Today’s consumers expect more. They want assistance at every step. Therefore, as marketers, we need to be one step ahead of our customers — it’s time to start predicting their needs regardless of where they are in their journey.

Search enables marketers to tap into real insights across media to predict consumer intent at scale. And putting the right actions behind that power lets marketers go from fragmented planning and chasing intent to building an engine that predicts what people need throughout the journey.

To build that engine, leading marketers are focusing on three things:  

1. Aligning their marketing to business outcomes
2. Leaning into customer lifetime value (CLV)
3. Applying automation and machine learning to make the engine run

The result is an assistive experience for their customers and new opportunities for their business.

Optimize media towards business outcomes with right measurement

It all starts with identifying and focusing on business outcomes that put results over media metrics. Consider this: 89% of leading marketers use strategic metrics, like gross revenue, market share, or CLV, to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

More Focus on Customer Lifetime Value:

Segmentation will never be perfect. But when a competitor understands segments by value, they’ll spend to reach — and win — the best customers.

That’s why it’s important to understand a customer’s overall value. Doing so can help inform bidding and build audiences. CLV measures the value a person brings to a business across all of their interactions over time — not just a single transaction. We’ve found that when marketers focus on CLV, they begin to attract more of the customers they care about, stoke ongoing engagement, and ultimately, increase retention.

Automate your campaign using Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence:

There’s an effective way for marketers to predict consumer intent. They don’t have to manually connect intent to marketing. Machines can now see, identify, and build those patterns.

Bringing it all together by automating creative, audience, bidding, attribution, and budgeting tools gives marketers a stronger shot at success.

Most marketers believe their KPIs could be better achieved with greater investment in automation and machine learning technologies.2 But they’re still cherry-picking their way into automation. Leaders, on the other hand, are making more holistic changes to their marketing. Today most companies divert to automation as they get positive response of the customer using machine learning.

Analyze today predict future & drive growth:

The ability to understand customers and tap into real intent is a game-changer for marketers. Make the decision to start building the engine to deliver what you care about: predicting intent to drive outcomes that grow your business.

Sources:

 Google/MIT, Global, Technology Review Insights, ML Leaders and Laggards, Leaders (n=186) defined as >15% increase in revenue or 15+ point market share increase, Laggards (n=176) defined as <0% growth in revenue or <0 point market share, 2018.

 MIT SMR/Google, Global, Future of Marketing/KPI Survey 2018, n=3200, manager +, full SMR industries, 2018.

 MIT SMR/Google, Global, Future of Marketing/KPI Survey 2018, n=3200, manager +, full SMR industries, KPI index (grouped based on 20/60/20 split) challenged n=645, capable n=1928, leaders n=652, 2018.