School of Analytics: Why Predictive or Prescriptive Marketing Insights?

It’s hard to prove the true value of your marketing investments without the correct use of analytics. Using marketing analytics is essential in today’s digitally-focused world. It can help us make smarter, more informed decisions. It’s also there to help make sense of marketing strategy, and which efforts in the marketing mix are paying off. 

When applying marketing data, it’s essential that the right data-driven decisions are made. This is where predictive and prescriptive marketing insights play an important role. We need to make sure that the data we are using is helping us make smarter decisions, so relying on intuitive decision-making only probably won’t get us the results we’re after.

Understanding Predictive and Prescriptive Marketing Insights

If you’re using marketing analytics, then you’re trying to understand trends and predict future events. Using marketing analytics is very effective at achieving this, but there’s one issue – making decisions based on the analytics. If you’re just relying on marketing analytics without predictive or prescriptive marketing insights, then you’re just using historical data to guess future outcomes. Relying on your intuition still isn’t completely accurate. Instead, you should use data that makes calculations for you on future outcomes. 

This is where predictive or prescriptive marketing insights come into play. Predictive and prescriptive analytics make up an essential part of any data strategy by offering automated correlations for you to understand the value of your data. This means your data helps to make decisions for you, making sure that you choose the best possible outcome based on the data you have available. 

By using predictive and prescriptive analytics in the marketing mix, your business will be able to make smarter decisions based on data. The goal is to not only have useful marketing analytics available but to make sure that this is helping your business to actually take the right steps forward. 

These marketing insights do not only use historical data. Instead, they rely on real-time data and mathematical calculations to provide different examples of scenarios to test. 

To better understand predictive and prescriptive marketing analytics, let’s take a closer look at each option. 

Predictive Marketing Insights

Predictive marketing insights look at all of the data that you have available and generate possible outcomes based on this. So instead of just having metrics available, you can actually create decisions from this. 

This avoids having to use your own knowledge and intuition to make decisions, and instead uses predictive analytics, which relies on data and mathematics, to make more informed and optimized decisions. 

Prescriptive Marketing Insights

Prescriptive analytics takes predictive analytics a step further by offering various different options that the business can take. Instead of just generating a single possible outcome, prescriptive marketing insights find even more paths to consider. 

Again, this shifts away from relying on intuition by focusing on real data-based decisions. Using prescriptive marketing analytics is important for your business to understand its full range of options, or paths to take. 

Why Use Predictive or Prescriptive Marketing Insights?

First of all, it’s important for your business to make use of both predictive and prescriptive marketing insights to gain a better understanding of possible outcomes. This is critical for smarter decision-making, and accessing a variety of possible outcomes. 

When it comes to something as complex as the correlation between data and different activities, the human brain is not designed to keep up with such complexities. We can’t simply make guesses from the data. Instead, we need the data to determine the best possible outcome for us. 

This is essential for understanding the true value of data and determining the cause-and-effect relationship between different marketing investments. Marketing data is just too complex to act on without predictive or prescriptive marketing insights. 

Conclusion

In order to make the most of your marketing strategy and understand exactly where each marketing dollar should be spent, smarter analytics need to be used. Predictive and prescriptive marketing insights are essential for choosing the best possible outcome determined by data. 

We need to make sure that when we use marketing analytics in the marketing mix, we are able to access predictive and prescriptive marketing insights. This is a must for achieving marketing success.

If you’re interested in learning more about marketing ROI and how our platform can help you bring added value to your business, book a demo with us today.