3 Ways Predictive Analytics Help You Hack Customer Acquisition

We recently put out a guidebook called, “ Customer Acquisition Hacks for the Multi-Channel B2B Marketer,” which contains 22 tips (or “hacks” as we like to call them) to increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and other sales enablement activities. We gathered hacks across the buyer’s journey, from increasing awareness of your brand and products to providing the final nudge during the decision-making stage.

You might be wondering where Radius sits within the four stages of the buyer’s journey and if predictive analytics is linked to any of the hacks that we presented. As a predictive marketing analytics platform, Radius helps you discover all of your top markets so that you can acquire new customers in cost-effective ways. Otherwise put: predictive analytics plays a vital role in helping you find and target the right prospects – the prospects that display the signals of a need or heightened interest in your products— so that you are focusing your marketing and sales enablement activities on the prospects who are more likely to buy.

Since making the decision of who to target is the starting point for putting together a strategy, executing campaigns and filling a pipeline, we can think about predictive analytics as having impact starting from the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey. In the awareness stage, you are introducing your brand and products to potential customers. It can also include pointing out a pain point that prospects did not realize they were overlooking, and demonstrating how your product resolves those problems or inefficiencies.

It’s important to keep a few things in mind as you drive prospects to this beginning stage of the buyer’s journey. One, you should base your targeting on some alignment in prospects’ needs or their openness to purchasing new solutions. While some marketing organizations may take a “batch and blast” strategy at this stage and contact any company that fits basic target parameters, such as size of business and industry, these mass communication attempts can often feel impersonal, uninvited or irrelevant. For this reason, they don’t often yield results.

By having insights on your prospects, such as the technology that they are embracing (or perhaps gaps in the products they are using), you can have better confidence that the prospects will be interested and open to hearing about your product. When you do reach out to them to introduce them to your brand and product, there is a higher likelihood of your solutions matching how they approach strategic investments in their business.

Two, in our eBook, we also discuss the importance of targeting look-alike customers. The opportunity to segment and target look-alike customers is increasingly available via digital channels, such as social media. You can increase your likelihood of success by assembling and targeting a group of prospects that are similar in the critical attributes to your best customers. And again, this is not solely looking at commonalities like industry or geography. It’s honing in on the qualities that make these prospects similar to your best customers in the ways that will enable relevant and high-impact conversations.

And three, we discuss the benefits of experimenting in new markets in our eBook. As a business, you have aligned your product with pain points in deciding which prospects to target and how to position your product’s benefits. But make sure you aren’t taking too myopic of an approach because you could be inadvertently limiting the opportunities for your business. Here’s an example to consider: there was a point in time when golf carts were vehicles solely reserved for transporting players on a golf course. But today we see golf carts in airport terminals, in theme parks, at resorts—basically, at many places where there is a need to transport guests across long distances. In the same way, you should be open-minded when you think about aligning your product’s benefits with the needs of potential customers. We think that looking at your company’s past performance metrics is the best way to hone in on signals that can inform strategy. And this can help you grow your business in ways that you might not have originally contemplated.

For the reasons that have just been mentioned, predictive analytics is a key component of identifying and targeting the right prospects. Doing so will enable you build a pipeline of high quality leads, allowing you to engage with companies that will be more receptive to hearing about your products and who are more likely to have a need for the solutions that you are providing.