Report: More Marketers Seeking to Leverage Predictive Analytics and AI

Although more marketers are discovering the advantages of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics, new research indicates that they are still facing several obstacles when trying to use this data and technology.

Pecan recently published its “State of Predictive Analytics in Marketing” report, and data suggested that most marketers (46%) wish that they could utilize AI to predict churn and retention on a customer level. About 40% would like to be able to use AI to determine customer lifetime value, and the same percentage want to identify upsell and cross-sell likelihood.

At the moment, the majority of marketers (51%) are using predictive analytics for customer-level predictions of future behavior. Approximately 50% are utilizing it to forecast customer trends. However, 40% claim that the high costs of manual data science are preventing them from using predictive analytics more often. The same percentage point to unorganized or unstructured customer data as their primary obstacle.

The Benefits of Investing in Data-Driven Marketing

Even though data and analytics remain difficult to leverage for some marketers, previous research suggests that they are aware of its benefits in terms of the customer experience.

Ascend2 released its “Using Data-Driven Marketing to Predict Future Performance” report, and statistics indicated that the majority of marketers (48%) now consider data-driven marketing to be most useful for customer experience/journey mapping. In the coming months, 40% stated that their budget for data-driven marketing is expected to increase “moderately.”

Furthermore, approximately 58% of marketers believe that improving the customer experience through data-driven marketing is going to become most important to decision-making.