Last Updated: January 12, 2021

Considering how much data we as marketers have, it still surprises me how much campaign money is spent blindly, without question, or because “that’s what we did last year.”  And we all know we should be incorporating quality data and business intelligence to the advertising mix, yet we are not. Let’s look into this a bit more.

I have spent many years in various marketing functions, from startups to software companies to multinational corporations. I’ve witnessed a shift in tactical activities, like ad planning, evolve from a broad stroke coverage to being very data driven.

But at a higher, more strategic level, any marketing team is still challenged to properly allocate budget by product or region, to determine what promotions to run and when, and to track the effectiveness of everything to be accountable to executive scrutiny. As much as marketers desire to address these challenges with quality data and business intelligence, the truth is sobering: there just isn’t enough time. The reason for this? Well, there are several:

  • Perhaps your company doesn’t have the reporting systems to quickly compute the spend of all of last year’s campaigns vs. the perceived lift in sales.
  • Or maybe your staff is too heads-down with everyday issues – such as creative direction, content deadlines or wrestling (sorry – “working”) with your fellow product managers – to spend time analyzing data.
  • It may be that your industry requires you to lock in your media spend for all of this year and next.

Ultimately, as much as you’d LOVE to have more information, best guesses eventually give way to broad stroke strategies relying heavily on what you did LAST year.

There is a better way.

 

Quality data and business intelligence leads to Future State Management

data and business intelligence

Instead of trying to analyze your historical holiday marketing performance data to drive decisions in the present alone, the key is to analyze the leading indicators of your business to give you a clearer view of the future. We call this “Future State Management.” Here’s how it works:

  1. Prevedere collects millions of external data sets – stock ticker values, consumer sentiment, energy prices, census information, weather data and more. We clean, optimize and organize all this data and have it all available in our Global Data Cloud.
  2. We analyze your internal performance data (for marketing, it would be sales by product and region) against our Global Data Cloud to determine what external factors are valid leading indicators of your business.
  3. We then combine the most predictive factors (both internal and external) into a single data model that simulates sales performance in the past as well as in the future.

 

Using all your tools for a better holiday marketing season

If we can account for all the elements that drive your business, we can predict (as much as 18 months out) the future performance of your company. This gives you the ability to plan for the holidays using accurate quality data and business intelligence to determine where you should load up or slow down on advertising, promotions, and inventory.

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Free download - CPG Playbook Forecasting and Predictive Analytics

This free illustrated playbook describes the 5-critical steps to incorporate the latest in quality data and business intelligence with predictive analytics to predict consumer purchase behavior with remarkable accuracy. Click to download here.