B2B predictive marketing is one of the most exciting and effectual ways of bringing in new business today.

 

In the B2B scenario, getting customers for your organization is usually a more long-drawn and intense process than in the B2C situation. Although many new techniques of B2B lead generation help, they are not always enough. We see many B2B marketers struggle with the process of qualifying prospects. Needless to say, this inability has left many organizations in a tizzy, negatively impacting the bottom line.

 

Today, some organizations have switched up and moved on with advanced marketing techniques like B2B predictive marketing and account scoring. Such firms enjoy a regular flow of lucrative leads flowing in. Moreover, their marketing teams aren’t desperate as a result of a lack of prospects. On the other hand, there are still many organization out there who don’t incorporate these techniques into their marketing outreach strategy. With this lack of in-depth and focused action, such companies are slowly feeling the hit of low sales. In a competitive market, such organizations eventually suffer and in most cases, cease to exist profitably.

 

In this article, let’s understand what predictive marketing and B2B account scoring are, and what they can do for your organization’s growth.

 

 

What is B2B Predictive Marketing Analytics?

 

No matter what specific industry your B2B business belong to, there is an element of risk attached to it. As more and more marketers have to be accountable for everything from lead generation to sales, eliminating this element of risk has become crucial.

 

B2B predictive marketing is essentially the process of predicting what is likely to happen in the future. Moreover, this prediction comes from analysing what happened in the past. By combining contextual and historical customer data, a probabilistic model is used to forecast which marketing tactics will bring in the desired results. At the same time, the main aim of such analysis is to discover which audiences or actions have a higher likelihood of bringing in the results you want.

 

 

 

 

The most important aspect of this emerging technology is that data drives these predictions. Further, data is central to all predictive marketing analysis.

 

Additionally, to simplify things, B2B predictive marketing is an extension f the 80/20 rule. This means that it follows the law that states 80% of an organization’s revenue comes from 20% of its prospects. B2B predictive analysis and techniques set out to identify this profitable 20% of your audiences. Essentially, such analysis helps B2B organizations predict which customers or accounts will most probably convert as a result of specific actions. 

 

 

How Is B2B Predictive Marketing Analysis Different?

 

Analytics have become incredibly important in B2B marketing these days. So, you might wonder, how is B2B predictive marketing different? After all, there is much impetus laid on Machine Learning (ML), Big Data, Small Data and even Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days.  For this reason, we see that more and more companies are getting savvier and more technology-led in their marketing efforts.

 

However, B2B predictive marketing analytics are not the same as other types of analysis. To understand precisely how they all differ from one another. To know how B2B predictive marketing analytics is different from others, let’s see what questions each can answer for marketers.

 

Descriptive Analytics  – What has happened and how has it happened in the past? Here we are mostly trying to look into the rearview mirror of your past marketing activities.

 

Diagnostic Analytics – Why has it happened? Here we try to establish a cause-and-effect relationship by analysing historical information, data and other intel.

 

Predictive Analytics – What will most likely happen as a result of any actions you take? These predictions are usually based on current, historical, intent and mined data.

 

Prescriptive Analytics– What course of action should I take? Here the recommendations are for systems, strategy, processes, and people in the organization.

 

As you can see, B2B predictive marketing analysis is not the same as descriptive, diagnostic or even prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics are useful in speculating the result of any efforts you take for marketing. As technology and data-centric marketing become the norm for our industry, your organization should have a comprehensive B2B predictive marketing plan in place to take on the new challenges that crop up every day.

 

 

Why Your Business Needs B2B Predictive Analysis Today

 

Surely, any B2B marketer’s job will become easy if they could essentially forecast the outcomes of their efforts. However, there are a wide variety of other benefits you will gain from employing B2B predictive marketing analysis into your arsenal.

 

Prospecting and Generating New Leads

 

With B2B predictive marketing analytics, generating new leads and prospects becomes a smoother, more streamlined process. Moreover, such methods help you understand who is most likely to buy from you.

 

Data crunching is a huge part of generating new leads within the B2B predictive marketing umbrella. Such a data-crunching method processes massive amounts of data from a variety of sources for business purposes such as connecting with new leads. These data sources include public and company records, social networking sites, web-based applications, or even data solutions company or partners. Data mining services are especially useful in such situations. Additionally, mining such data reveals a wide variety of valuable insights regarding buying habits, preferences, or other vital details.

 

 

 

 

Moreover, B2B predictive marketing modelling technology helps companies sort through thousands of filmographies to foretell who is likely to buy from them in the future. The most commonly used filmographies include revenue size, industry, company size, annual turnover, etc. On the other side, some important signals such as new job posts, management changes, new internal policies, business expansion etc. help companies determine who is a prospect in a given market. When these are all put together, it helps in generating new opportunities.

 

Lead Prioritization

 

Earlier, lead prioritization was called lead scoring. Both these terms just refer to the process of prioritizing leads, prospects and accounts based on the likelihood of them taking actions that you desire. Initially, this process centred around demographic information. We now know demographic information as filmographic (as explained above). However, although filmographic are essential, they are not all that’s needed.

 

In the case of B2B predictive marketing, lead prioritization is not just about traditional scoring with a view of understanding intent, fit or behaviours. Earlier, marketing teams use to capture known and external attributes from third-party sources to get these insights. However, with B2B predictive marketing for lead prioritization, things are different.

 

With such processes, the time spent on procuring a lead reduces dramatically. Moreover, the money spent on lead generation efforts brings a higher ROI. Additionally, such predictive models help in bringing to attention the most lucrative leads or the ones that are most likely to convert to paying customers. However, for such ease and smoothness in operations, there must be continuous communication and review between the sales and marketing departments.

 

In cases without predictive analytics, first lead scoring occurs and only then can teams move on to prioritization. However, by employing the services of a data solution company, machine learning and data processes lead prioritization becomes faster. Rather than bringing in a pool of prospects out of which only some are viable, such companies can bring you long lists of hot prospects. Mostly, such processes make use of scientific and mathematical machine intelligence as opposed to standard scoring that relies on trial-and-error.

 

You can predict the viability of some essential factors in this manner. The outcome of this is ease in predicting the profitability of a prospect, lifetime revenue, or even sales acceptance.

 

 

Account Based Marketing

 

In recent years, B2B Account Based Marketing has become a successful strategy to rope in new business. Most importantly, ABM treats individuals or customer accounts as individual markets. By doing so, each lead or prospect receives customized communication approaches and solutions. Additionally, as marketers have realized the value of offering customized pitches for improved success, B2B predictive marketing has taken on new importance.

 

With identity association features that are common to B2B predictive marketing plans, marketers can make ABM easier. Moreover, establishing which accounts or companies are most viable for contact becomes easier. It becomes much easier to understand who the purchase decision-makers are in a given organization. Initiating of sales at the account level becomes much more manageable.

 

Additionally, B2B predictive marketing can help you identify prospects that have attributes similar to those of your existing customers. The ‘birds of a feather, flock together’ mindset may help you in this situation by leading you to people who match your ideal customer profile. Moreover, an account that is similar to the one you have catered to in the past is more straightforward to service. In a scenario like this, you will be able to assuage their problems and find solutions faster.

 

For B2B predictive marketing analytics for ABM, historical data, as well as behaviour analysis, can help tremendously.

 

 

Cross-Selling and Upselling

 

Surely, the process of acquiring a lead and transforming them into a customer is a demanding process. However, the best way to maximize the efforts you put into lead generation is to cross-sell and upsell instead. Selling to people who are already your customers is exceptionally effective, far easier and can boost your revenues. Additionally, it is far more cost effective to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones. Although lead generation is an ongoing process, cross-selling and upselling should be integral parts of your strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

Upselling is where you motive the customer to be a more expensive product, avail a more intensive service package, or buy additional upgrades. All in all, such activities aim at making a more profitable net sale. In some cases, merely asking your customer if they would like an upgrade is a great help. However, without the right CRM system or predictive intelligence, you won’t know what to ask the customer.

 

On the other hand, cross-selling is the process of selling an additional service or product to your existing customer. Here, the objective is to have a larger sales volume from a particular client. However, it is important to be tactful while cross-selling. After all, nobody wants to feel like they are forcefully sold something they might not need. In this scenario, you will significantly benefit from B2B predictive marketing intelligence, analytics and insights. These will help you ask the right questions at the right time to get a more significant sale.

 

With B2B predictive marketing intelligence, your marketing and sales team can use insights to understand what a customer is most likely to purchase. They will know what offering suits a particular client best. Moreover, it helps you portray a well-researched demeanour to prospective leads and existing customers.

 

 

Message Personalization and Hyper-Segmentation

 

Ask any B2B marketer today and they’ll attest to the growing importance of personalized customer experiences. Personalization has great potential for increasing audience engagement by bringing the most relevant content to them. Moreover, offering a personalized experience to your customer base is a challenge with a solid data solutions partner to fuel you with the correct intel. Additionally, the process of hyper-segmentation that can help you offer personalized experiences can’t possibly happen without the right knowledge.

 

With B2B predictive marketing analytics and insights, offering customized communications is simpler. You don’t have to sit in the dark and work based on assumptions or guesswork. Such techniques help bring in concrete, science-backed results that tell you what is most likely to succeed in bringing in the results you so desire. These techniques also enable your staff to have more meaningful, one-on-one conversations and create content based on intelligent insights. Such substantial conversations and customer-centric dialogue have a positive impact on the bottom line.

 

While a robust B2B predictive marketing tool is essential for this, a precursor to everything you do is clean, well-maintained, and updated data. Since such marketing insights depend directly on the quality of your database, skimping on the costs of CRM database cleaning, email list building services or data mining services is a fool’s move.

 

Sales Enablement and Forecasting

 

For most B2B organizations, the ability to forecast concerning sales is nothing short of a superpower. The right B2B predictive marketing model can help bring in synergy through the sales year. Moreover, it will keep bringing in a steady flow of bankable leads, and assist in the process of lead enrichment. Additionally, the process of allocating resources for maximum returns becomes more manageable. Most importantly, such preparedness makes you a more efficient entity.

 

Armed with the appropriate predictive analysis technology, your B2B organization can assure that the best sales resources go where the returns will be higher. Additionally, you can create specific behaviour models or algorithms to cater to every situation. When you can predict customer behaviour efficiently, it helps with sales enablement as well as for prevention customer attrition.

 

Furthermore, we see that B2B predictive marketing intelligence improves lead enrichment, account scoring, routing of sales, lead generation, and lead prioritization. Mostly, it just helps you streamline your sales process for maximum efficiency and returns. Additionally, it also enables you to predict any negative behaviour so you can take steps to prevent the same. It also helps you boost renewal rates among your customer base, increasing the overall returns from campaigns. 

 

 

Build Omnichannel Customer Journeys

 

Even B2B customers these days are present across a variety of channels. Their buying and viewing habits are not restricted to a particular set of networks anymore. Gone are the days when a customer would engage with your brand only via your website. In today’s changing scenario, customer intelligence has to come from all the channels that they frequent. Omnichannel customer presence today demands an omnichannel approach to data intelligence as well.

 

 

Moreover, to offer a highly-personalized experience to your customers having a comprehensive report of data scraped from many networks is the basic requirement. In such a scenario, B2B predictive marketing analytics have a lot to offer. Such analysis has the power to combine various facets of email, mobile and website usage to unearth relevant customer data. The combination of the intel thus extracted brings insights that help markets create more holistic B2B shopping or purchase experiences. Most importantly, they enable you to create consistent experiences, irrespective of the platform or channel.  

 

B2B Predictive Marketing Analytics Today: A Story Told By Statistics

 

Surely, we understand the importance of having a robust B2B predictive marketing tool for your organization. After all, we’ve elaborated on all the myriad of ways that such a tool can help your marketing efforts. However, don’t just take our word for it. Let’s look at some statistics that show just how impactful B2B predictive marketing intelligence has been in the industry.

 

B2B Predictive Marketing and Personalization

 

• Around 70% of B2B customer organizations would like to receive relevant content that can speak directly to them. This is even truer when they are researching for vendors, service providers or partner organizations. Just imagine how easy it will be to cater to this expectation backed by a strong B2B predictive marketing intelligence tool.
• The report also elaborates on how most B2B buyers want to see relevant websites that speak directly about their market, sector, industry, and company. Surely enough, insights and intel gained by B2B predictive marketing models will make it easier to offer such experiences.
• Additionally, the study found that almost 47% of US B2B marketers believe that their brand website’s customization for each account is integral to their ABM strategy. This statistic goes to show that most B2B organizations are adapting to the changing needs of today’s customer. If your organization wants to remain profitable in this competitive market, B2B predictive marketing analysis can get you there.

 

The Growing Importance of Data Intelligence and Analytics in the B2B Industry

 

• A study by Progress shows that 70% of the participating B2B organization made use of historical information, big data, and predictive analytics to make marketing outreach more effective. The most important thing to notice is that a vast majority of companies understand the importance of data analysis. B2B predictive marketing is not an anomaly, it is the norm.
• An Altimier report shows how important it is to collect data from all possible channels and sources. Here, content strategists from North America and Western Europe were surveyed. The report found that among metric data importance, data collected from social media got 65% of approval. Website analytics comes in second with 63%.
• As these numbers show, data intelligence from omnichannel sources are integral to your marketing strategy. Your competition is likely already using the power of B2B predictive marketing analysis to its benefit. If you aren’t already onboard, its time to get started.

 

How Do I Know If I Need a B2B Predictive Marketing Solution?

 

As we’ve shown you throughout this article, B2B predictive marketing analysis and solutions have a lot to offer your organization. In fact, owing to the highly competitive and demanding market today, not having such a solution is marketing suicide. Most companies have already understood the value of B2B predictive marketing solutions. Likewise, they enjoy increased profits, efficiency and better returns of investment.

 

If you don’t have an appropriate solution or tool in place as yet, there is no question about delaying this. Still, if you’re unsure of whether your organization qualifies or not, answer these questions.

 

• Are there gaps in your database that prevent you from evaluating the most lucrative markets for your products? If you are still working on guesswork principles or with a ‘darts-in-the-dark’ approach, you might need help.
• Do you know which accounts can be re-engaged to reduce customer attrition or churn rates? Losing out on opportunities because your team lacks customer intel or intelligence is simply heart-breaking. Moreover, if this continues unchecked, your ROIs will reduce dramatically.
• Are sales teams hitting goals effectively and without wasting resources on non-qualified prospects? If your precious marketing resources go to dead-end prospects frequently, it may be time to start with a predictive marketing solution that brings in maximum returns for your investment and efforts.

 

Some More Questions to Ask

 

• Does your organization have the right marketing automation and CRM database system that consistently regulates your marketing operations? Moreover, are these database systems cleaned and maintained regularly? If this is not the case, you should start with a data solutions service that helps you streamline things.
• Do your existing databases contain all the intel and records that you need for high-quality predictive analysis? Even if you have decided to get onboard a B2B predictive marketing tool, the results will only be as good as your raw data. Since your marketing team isn’t equipped to deal with this task, having an on-demand manual data mining service provider is crucial.

 

Why You Should Partner with BizProspex

 

With BizProspex, an industry leader with 6+ years of experience, getting your organization ready for a B2B predictive marketing implementation becomes easy. Moreover, it is the most logical course of action. We help you bring your database up to the mark so that any insights you receive are accurate. Moreover, our data mining solutions and skip tracing services are useful for building that quality database everyone talks about.

 

If you are ready to start a new chapter in your growth story, we’re the right data partner for you! Get in touch now to learn how BizProspx can help you achieve your goals.