Predictive intelligence is no longer just a buzzword that appears in ‘a soon-to-be-trend’ article; it’s a reality and it’s here to make marketers more effective than ever before.

While the phrase may sound intimidating, once you get to know the ways in which it can help you, you’ll realise that it’s a must-have tool for the modern marketer. In fact, predictive intelligence can un-complicate your life by turning huge amounts of raw data into helpful insights that you can use to generate better and more effective campaigns. Let’s see how.

Personalising Lead Scoring, Nurturing and Conversion

In the age of personalisation, you simply can’t afford to send the same newsletter or email promotion to your entire database. In order to reach each potential customer with the right message at the right time, you need to know where on their buyer journey they are and what could help them move forward. But when you have a database of 1000+ leads, this can turn into a pretty time-consuming, not to mention an endeavour prone to error.

This is where predictive intelligence and data science come into place: using sophisticated algorithms, they gather information about a certain lead from your CRM, from your marketing automation tool, from your previous engagements with the potential customer, and from their general online behavior to tell you where on their buyer journey they are. You can learn if it’s time to send them a free e-book, schedule a sales call, invite to a webinar or if they should be dropped from the process altogether as they are not likely to convert and waste your time and resources.

In other words, predictive intelligence helps you understand where to focus your efforts. Lead scoring using predictive analytics is your most advanced tool to find out whether a lead needs more nurturing, is ready to be converted or if the funnel should end immediately.

“86% of marketing executives have already indicated they have seen a positive return on investment in marketing technology and predictive analytics,” HubSpot’s Valerie Levin reports. “The future of B2B marketing will focus on predictive analysis and intelligence, and have a major impact on lead scoring and content targeting.”

Smart Content to Drive Delightful Customer Experiences

Once you have scored your lead and worked out where they are in the buyers’ journey, it’s time to deliver the content they’ve been expecting. But this doesn’t mean that you have to do it manually. Smart content is intelligently personalised according to your customer’s needs and can be delivered automatically.

Here’s how it works: in the beginning of their journey, all your potential customers will see the same website and landing page. As time passes however, using smart data will allow you to gather information about how they spend their time on your website, what other things they are interested in and what type of content they responded to. After gathering this data, you can then customise the content they receive via email, or view on your website.

“Predictive intelligence, an important component of predictive analytics, is also critical in learning which pieces of content to target to which customers,” Levin says. “After predictive lead scoring reveals where each customer is and might be headed in the buying journey, you can glean insights from predictive analytics for establishing the tone, material and style of content each prospect will respond to most fervently.”

“Marketing professionals who work based on data, emotions and customer connections are the whole package in targeting content most effectively.”

Smart content benefits both marketers and consumers:  it enables marketers to help their customers with the right content and the right, while customers have a better user experience and aren’t annoyed with irrelevant content.