How to analyze big data to enhance the purchase journey

Big data can be overwhelming. Here is how to use predictive lead scoring and persona-based marketing to analyze big data to drive business.

Big data is bigger than we can possibly imagine, and the word “big” doesn’t do it justice. For today’s marketer, the greatest advantage to using this data lies in analytics.

Often, the sales team will cite the inability to identify the most likely buyer and a lack of knowledge of the buyer’s business needs as primary challenges to closing deals and making the sale.

Modern analytics – including gauging digital body language, predictive lead scoring, and persona-based marketing – can help eliminate these uncertainties. When coupled with close integration between sales and marketing, your company can take full advantage of the big data-driven business.

Digital Body Language

The earlier you leverage insights the better. Digital body language data can be used to move prospects down the marketing funnel by putting personalized, relevant content in front of buyers wherever they travel online.

A prospect’s digital body language is created by following their online activities:

  • Visits to websites
  • Research the prospect has completed on their own (including any downloaded informational material)
  • Social media activity

Analytics transforms digital body language into useful insights. Your team can ask and answer questions like:

  • What is the best product to offer to this particular buyer?
  • How can we add products to increase the value of this deal?

Predictive Lead Scoring

Just as the sales team is under pressure to close deals, marketers are under pressure to deliver the best leads. Predictive lead scoring technology helps produce high quality prospects by evaluating a prospective profile and behavioral information from customer-relationship management solutions and third-party sources.

Predictive lead scoring technology also uncovers patterns in data that our human instinct or a rule-based system may miss. The use of data to create stronger insights increases sales and marketing efficiency, as marketing can better identify qualified leads and send only the best to sales. Additionally, insights gleaned from predictive lead scoring save time and drive up ROI.

But don’t forget the old adage, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you don’t invest in reliable and high quality data, you won’t reap the benefits.

Predictive lead scoring is incredibly popular with those who use it. In 2014, a study conducted by SiriusDecisions found that of organizations using predictive lead scoring, 90 percent agreed that it provided more value than traditional lead scoring, and 98 percent of respondents said they would purchase predictive lead scoring again.

Persona-Based Content Marketing

Relevancy is imperative when you attempt to connect with prospects. Chasing poor leads or presenting qualified leads with content that isn’t relevant is a waste of time and resources.

A persona-based content marketing strategy utilizes representations of your actual customers to create full portraits of your ideal buyers. This strategy helps you identify leads worth chasing and then provides them with content that applies to specific prospects at varying stages of the buying process.

Personas should be created by combining insights from your actual customers and determined through a combination of data, including past buyer’s digital body language, surveys and interviews, market research, and up to date statistics and trends.

A complete persona profile includes demographic and background information such as:

  • The buyer’s job title
  • Life outside work
  • Household income
  • Company size
  • Location and budget
  • Behavioral information like their role in purchasing
  • Their pain points
  • Content consumption

By doing this, personas help you identify the most likely priorities and preferences of prospects to help you provide them with the most relevant content at every stage of the marketing funnel. With each persona-based content campaign, collect your own data on the successes (and failures) with each type of persona. Historical data will feed into continued success down the road.

The thorn in the side of marketers has always been wondering which half of your budget is being used well, and which half is being wasted. Big data – coupled with powerful analytics – moves marketers forward towards full return on investment.

A big data-driven business understands its customers more fully, and connects with them quickly on a more relevant scale. Leveraging big data on your own campaigns creates efficiency and feeds future success. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in creation as you read this – make sure you’re making use of them!

*Homepage image via Shutterstock.

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