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The rapidly evolving world of marketing analytics is adding more to bottom line every month, and this trend is set to continue. Peter O’Connor, Vice President Sales Asia Pacific at global analytics software provider Snowflake, explains why.

Marketing analytics encompasses the processes and technologies that enable marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives. The insights provided enable better targeting of marketing campaigns and ads, which in turn leads to higher sales and better customer loyalty.

As companies look for innovative new ways to drive further growth, the value of marketing analytics becomes even more important.

The top seven ways marketing analytics can deliver value are:

1. Continuous growth of real-time analytics

Analytics enables marketing teams to see the performance of their campaigns in real time. From there, targeting and messaging can be quickly adjusted to optimize performance. To do this on a larger scale, marketing organizations must invest in a platform that can balance batch data loads with processing for business intelligence and business analytics.

In other words, the platform must allow different types of jobs to run in parallel by adding compute resources to clusters as needed.

2. Pay more attention to data security

It will become more and more accepted that securing marketing data is just as important as creating the right infrastructure to deliver it. As a result, marketers will increase their investment in technology that emphasizes encryption, access control, network surveillance, and physical security measures. In the meantime, they will try to work with vendors who have extensive surveillance, alerting and cybersecurity practices in place.

3. Data protection conscious data collection

Leading marketers will also be more proactive in protecting consumer privacy. These include offering new controls that allow users to log out, deleting data once a user has left a platform, cleaning up unnecessary data such as fine-grained location information to ensure it isn’t saved, and enabling tight access controls.

4. Accelerated introduction of predictive analytics

With the growing capabilities of machine learning, predictive analytics will better identify the likelihood of future outcomes by analyzing historical data. Continuously improving machine learning models can make predictions more accurate over time, leading to an increase in customer lifetime value and a decrease in churn.

Companies’ investments in predictive analytics are in line with the hype that has sparked in recent years. Some industry watchers predict that the global market could be worth around $ 11 billion by 2022.

5. Increased investment in first-party data

Once the lifeblood of digital advertising ecosystems, cookies are on their way out. Google has announced that Chrome will be phased out soon and they have already been removed from Safari and Firefox. They are no longer used to track consumers from website to website and target advertising.

Website operators must therefore collect more limited data on visitor behavior themselves and then standardize this with other first-party data sets in order to achieve a holistic view of the customer. This is a huge win for consumer advocates, but a headache for advertisers and agencies who will find it more difficult to re-target ads, build audiences in their data management platforms, leverage multi-touch attribution, and conduct other vital digital marketing activities.

6. Increase in contextual customer experiences

Marketing analytics will become more context sensitive in 2021 and beyond. Given that marketers are losing the rich behavioral data cookies have provided in the past, they have increased the motivation to invest in this promising area of ​​insight.

In practice, this means that marketers don’t just base their messages on known and inferred attributes of their customers (e.g. customer journey and what mood they are likely to be in.

7. Increased reliance on reputable third-party sources

While companies invest in first-party data, that data has one major caveat: it only lets marketers see how people have interacted with their own touchpoints. In the midst of the phasing out of browser-based cookies, companies will continue to invest in third-party data sets that provide a more reliable view of customers and can augment the first-party data they collect.

Together, these trends will shape the way marketing analytics are used across the business landscape. Marketing teams get detailed insights into customer behavior and preferences, which enables them to better target their campaigns.

Think about how analytics can be better used in your company. The results might just be surprising.