Why Use Prescriptive Analytics to Optimize the Marketing Mix?

We all know about the importance of data and analytics in marketing, but how do we actually use it to create an impact? How do we find the right course of action? This is where prescriptive analytics comes into practice. 

Today’s digital marketing landscape requires many technical tools and data-driven processes. In order to optimize marketing efforts and produce initiatives that deliver results, analytics should be used to make smarter decisions. 

Using prescriptive analytics to optimize the marketing mix is important if you want to be able to do it in a cost-efficient way. This allows you to make more informed decisions based on your business goals and targets. Finding trends and choosing the right steps to take can be tricky in today’s world of data overload. Because even if you find those trends, you will have an extremely hard time without prescriptive analytics to project whether the trend is worth taking action on. Will it be worthwhile in the long run, or is it just a shortcut that will give you a short boost in your marketing efforts?

Using prescriptive analytics offers a huge opportunity to make good use of this for more successful marketing. This is achieved by helping you see correlations between cause and effect of different marketing initiatives and investments. This will help you project what routes will best fit your company on its current growth path. 

Maybe your company is a start-up and the best way forward is to have a marketing mix that offers low-hanging fruits ASAP because you need cash now. However, this may not have any good impact in the long run on revenue.

Or, it’s the opposite and your company is in big need of projecting a trend that it can rely on in the long run to really achieve amazing growth and revenue to become a big enterprise. Then you might be looking for trends that seem to be holding up for longer and are more long-term. 

Without using prescriptive analytics for your marketing investments and initiatives, it’s hard to know what to take action on when it comes to spending money on your marketing mix.

What is Prescriptive Analytics?

When looking at the different phases of business analytics, prescriptive analytics is the final third stage. This area focuses on using the data available to determine the best possible course of action. 

Prescriptive analytics combines descriptive and predictive analytics with technology. The process is aimed at helping businesses and marketing managers to make better decisions with all of the data available. 

Find out how you can plan your marketing strategy with foresight & prescriptive analytics.

Prescriptive analytics is action-based. While we may be well acquainted with gathering data, we also need to know how to use it to make smart decisions that achieve actionable goals. 

Using Prescriptive Analytics in the Marketing Mix

Your business’s marketing objectives can cover a range of different strategies and areas of implementation. Wherever you are focusing your marketing efforts, and whichever channels you choose, your marketing initiatives need to be backed up by data for a greater chance of success. 

Today’s world is full of data. Particularly in digital marketing, we are able to gather loads of valuable insights into our customers and industry. Marketers need to leverage these analytics, using them to create more meaningful actions. 

Prescriptive analytics is about creating these actionable insights for whichever channel you choose to utilize and spend more money on. This type of analytics is incredibly useful and it’s something that is quickly starting to play a major role in digital marketing which is why we created this blog post on how to create an analytics-driven mindset.

Analytics-Driven Company Culture

Why You Need to Use Prescriptive Analytics to Optimize Your Marketing Efforts

So prescriptive analytics is important for the marketing mix, but how exactly can it be used to optimize your marketing investments? We have outlined some of the key advantages below. 

Make More Strategic Decisions

Many marketers follow broad industry trends and general consumer behavior. The problem with this is that your customers and your brand are unique. You are targeting a different set of customers to other brands, and your marketing initiatives need to be optimized to perfectly match your position in the industry. 

Using prescriptive analytics offers marketers more insights into their business, industry, and target audience. This allows you to create marketing initiatives that leave a bigger impact by focusing on actions that lead to a specific outcome. 

Instead of just joining a trend, your business can target clear goals, and use prescriptive analytics to determine which steps will lead to that specific outcome.

In order to make more strategic decisions about your marketing mix, you need to understand which channels, initiative, and tactics will get you the results you want. Of course you also need to know how much to spend on each of these areas. This ius where the right analytics solution for marketers is important. 

Reduce Risk

Prescriptive analytics doesn’t just look at what is happening or has happened in the past. This data looks at what will work through certain steps and why this is the case. The more data that becomes available and is processed leads to analytics that are more accurate and specific. Take a look at our blog post on data science for more info.

With more detailed and accurate analytics, you can ensure far greater success  from your marketing initiatives. This reduces risk, allowing your business to make more precise and accurate judgments of situations. 

Increase Your ROI

By utilizing more accurate and actionable data, your marketing budget will be able to go a lot further. Improve the success of your marketing spend and enhance your ROI. 

Using prescriptive analytics in the marketing mix means you will be able to open up more accurate assessments of scenarios and gain better insights on what actions are most worthwhile. This results in more successful marketing investments without wasting marketing dollars in the wrong places. 

Increase Engagement Over Different Channels

Your customers are all different, and the channels across your marketing mix also differ. By using more precise and useful insights, you will be able to provide the perfect engagement mix for these different channels. 

This can include email marketing, social media, text message marketing, call center marketing, digital media, and so on. Knowing how to engage with customers better will help your business to grow.

Improve Communication

This type of analytics offers a deeper understanding of the different communication methods that will work for different customers. Know which channels will yield stronger results in which scenarios, and leverage this to increase your success. 

For example, prescriptive analytics can look into customers at different levels in the sales funnel, and determine which communication methods are most effective. This allows you to not only deliver the right content but deliver it in a way that ensures a better outcome. 

Communication Analytics

Make Better Sense of Large Data

We have so much data available these days, and prescriptive analytics lets us condense this into useful actions. Instead of sifting through massive pools of data, marketers can now quickly utilize large data to make real decisions. This opens up the door to a whole new world of marketing opportunities. 

Taking more meaningful advantage of this data offers more opportunities for long-term success. It also gives your business better insights to use for scaling your business’s growth. 

The marketing mix needs to make the most of analytics to produce more meaningful marketing initiatives. As we focus more and more on technology, prescriptive analytics have become an essential part of effective marketing investments. 

Data needs to be used to make smarter decisions in your marketing strategy. By making the most of prescriptive analytics, you will be implementing initiatives that deliver better results and really achieve your goals. 

Looking for the perfect prescriptive analytics tool to take your marketing mix to the next level? Book a demo with us today to find out more.