What are your biggest opportunities & challenges in predictive marketing for next 12-24 months?
Radius’ biggest opportunity is that CMOs now control the acquisition budgets of the business and have a direct effect on revenue growth. In order for CMOs to drive growth they need to better identify new prospects, grow share of wallet among existing customers and re-engage prospects who did not buy before. This is possible only with better insights. Predictive marketing platforms provide these insights that will enable better market entry and budget allocation decisions for modern CMOs.
The biggest challenge is educating enterprises that they can benefit from adopting predictive now. Predictive is a rapidly emerging space and marketing teams need to be educated on how to leverage predictive and derive business benefits from it. The focus needs to be on increasing familiarity with predictive in the tech stack, helping marketers understand how predictive fits into their marketing programs, and how they can best achieve success with predictive.
What keeps your clients up at night?
A big area of focus for our clients is hitting their metrics. Marketing organizations are new to being measured by numbers rather than creative output. There’s a major paradigm shift happening in companies where it’s no longer about your creative output, but instead about how well you have accomplished goals in absolute numbers in a certain time frame. A great example of this shift is a change in the focus on the funnel from MQLs converted, to opportunities created. Marketing owns a bigger piece of the customer journey and the metrics need to reflect that.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about when it comes to a predictive approach?
The hardest thing to educate clients about is how they can bridge the gap between technology and business value. Marketers understand what predictive is, but there’s a gap in knowledge around how predictive works in current marketing processes, how easily and quickly predictive can be deployed and how predictive ultimately drives revenue and growth.
Fundamentally, predictive helps in three ways:
- It bridges gaps in data found in other marketing systems like your CRM and marketing automation
- It leverages larger datasets and more advanced buying signals that give insights into your best prospects and markets
- It helps you identify your best customers and predicts ‘look alikes’ in both existing and new segments
What do you say to skeptics who ask if predictive marketing is a reality?
Marketing has become data-driven, leading to an increasing emphasis on showing the ROI for your marketing spend. Marketers need to be more analytical about their efforts.Marketers need to know if they’re targeting the right prospects and using their budget effectively. Being data-driven in your marketing efforts means having an acute sense of your target audience, a deep understanding of what motivates them to buy and which offers in the customer journey will make them convert.
Predictive gives you answers to all those questions with the added benefit of predicting your prospect’s likelihood to take favorable actions.
How can B2B brands benefit from predictive marketing?
B2B brands can benefit from predictive by identifying target accounts and focusing their budget on reaching those targets. Marketing is no longer about spraying your budget and hoping something will stick. The focus needs to be on targeting the right people at the right time in the buyer’s journey, and providing them with content that is relevant and useful to them. B2B brands can use predictive to target key accounts directly, build a workflow that they have high confidence in and speed up how quickly they funnel the best opportunities to their sales team.
–Darian Shirazi is CEO of Radius
