Predictive Marketing Technology: A Beginner's Guide

Want to get maximum ROI with all your marketing efforts? This is a good time to make good friends with predictive marketing technology (predictive marketing). Not so long ago, large companies were willing to invest a lot of effort and money in collecting data to decipher the behavior of their customers. However, the digital landscape has now changed drastically, with online marketing becoming super competitive and online customers scattered all over the place.

Here's some good news! The emergence of new technologies has paved the way for marketing platforms to turn giant data algorithms into optimized predictive technologies. Take it easy and no need to bring your data science manual. In this article, you will learn how to optimize online marketing with predictive technology, targeting visitors before they even enter the site.

What is Predictive Marketing Technology?

Predictive marketing technology will analyze your site's visitor data to identify patterns. With this information, marketers can deliver targeted experiences to visitors with similar behavior and help move them down the marketing funnel.

Our latest research on e-commerce data collected in Indonesia shows that the ratio of female mobile users is more than 50% compared to only about 40% for men, while the ratio of desktop usage is higher for men as much as 60% and for women. is under 50%. With this data, marketers can use predictive technology to specifically target visitors based on their gender.

For example, knowing that women are turning to mobile more, companies targeting female users can customize the mobile experience with custom menus and real-time product recommendations to create the big picture for female visitors (of which 50% are more likely to buy). So instead of spending energy and money to reach female customers on desktop, brand can communicate and establish direct connections via mobile devices.

How does it work?

The way it works itself is very simple. Let's say your site gets thousands of visitors and technology predicts that a hundred of those visitors are highly likely to buy. One thing you need to do is, integrate the marketing platform into the selected advertising platform (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Yandex Direct) to increase the segment of users with high purchase potential to your advertising platform.

You can then reach visitors across sites and apps, and communicate directly with them through targeted ads. Because the platform already predicts visitors who have a high purchase potential, you will see more conversions compared to using the 'spray-and-pray' (anytime anywhere). And again, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) You will increase drastically.

Using predictive technology, marketers can better understand the tendencies of their users and direct them to the appropriate message, product or discount, so that they are more engaged. This allows marketers to optimize ad spend to simplify their conversion funnel.

In short, this technology will analyze data from all visitors (prospects and customers), draw conclusions about their trend patterns, and identify the habits of certain groups to predict visitor behavior.

Although that's not all. Using predictive marketing technology, you can assess visitors for their purchasing tendencies and send them targeted and personalized notifications.

Another insight gained from research in the Indonesian e-commerce space also shows that traffic on mobile sites in the country reaches 71%. This shows the great potential for marketers to target mobile users with high discounts and lifetime value, some features are information from predictive technology. This way, marketers can better understand historical and real-time data and predict future behavior. And the results aren't worth it: with communications that have been personalized and customized, customers are more engaged and convert better.

Closing the Gap Between Marketing and Advertising

If you run an e-commerce site, of course you have a marketing strategy. You can use AdWords, Facebook Ads, Display Ads, and more, to attract the attention of site visitors. You don't know much about them, but expect them to click on your ad and visit their site thanks to the segmentation and targeting you've implemented through your ad platform. For this strategy to work, you may have set aside a large budget for online advertising, but, most of the time, you will still not be able to adjust spending on advertising spend. The payoff turned out not to be worth all the effort, time and money that had been spent on the strategy.

Let's look back at the Indonesian data mentioned earlier to understand this scenario and how predictive technology can change the course of the game with the use of personalization tools. The figure shows that desktop temporary activity hit 40% during the day, between 09:00 am and 16:00 pm, mobile sessions hit 90% in the early hours, with a peak at 04:00 am. This means that during the day, visitors spend more time browsing on desktop than on mobile, but in the morning, evening and early morning, mobile visitors increase drastically.

With this demographic insight, marketers can optimize customer browsing according to their digital channels and target the right users at the right time. This is when technology helps close the gap between marketing and advertising. Using a platform like Insider, you can predict which visitors are highly likely to make a purchase and reach people across different ad platforms anonymously.

When and How To Get Started?

As with any relationship, reaping the full benefits of investing in predictive marketing technology takes long-term effort. This is because the accuracy and efficiency of each engine data depends on how much data is in the system. The more data, the more accurate the patterns and insights will be. So, the best time to start is now.

To get started, all you need to do is integrate a predictive marketing technology platform into your site, enabling it to start collecting data and creating smart segments that you can use to target visitors with a higher likelihood of conversion. You will definitely see the marketing numbers increase. The available tools are quite simple, user-friendly, and do not require any special knowledge of coding or data science. Simply pick the one that best fits your business goals, pick from the shelf and get it, ready to send relevant messages and establish personal communication with the segments of users that really matter.

- Information: This Guest Article was written by Edwin Halim. Edwin Halim works as a Strategic Account Manager at Insider. He can be contacted via email: edwin@useinsider.com.