To predict how your consumers are going to behave is beneficial because it allows you to reach out to them with the right message at the right time to get them to make a purchase from your organization over your competitors.  But, predictive analytics are only as good as the data you supply the software.

According to an Alteryx Study, almost 40 percent of business don’t know how to properly sort their data into usable information because of the massive amount of data.  Today, businesses don’t have the problem of having access to too little data, the problem is, is there is too much data.

Having too much data can be just as bad as having inaccurate or not enough data, because unless you can sort your data, it’s useless to your organization.  Furthermore, because there is so much data coming in from multiple sources — email, social media, in-store comments and purchases and even customer service calls — it can be hard to capture and properly turn the data into sensible and usable information that will allow you to predict behavior and purchase patterns and, ultimately, create a marketing campaign.  In fact, the study showed that 37 percent of businesses surveyed simply can’t capture and organize the data that’s continuously coming in all around them.

Because data is so prevalent and available to marketers, it’s important to have an analytics system that collects the data and can store it in one central location.  But, even with the ability to automatically collect and sort information, it will still take man-hours to sift through and decide which data is usable and which is not helpful to creating relevant marketing material to reach out to your target audience.

Once you have created valuable information from your data, you can then segment your database into smaller, like-minded customers and send each subgroup information based on their past purchasing habits, interests and needs.

Timothy Freeman
President 
Print & Graphic Communications Association