How SAS visual analytics on Viya can improve marketing

Movies and TV shows are great at establishing narratives, hooking the audience into that narrative, and leaving them wanting more. This is the reason why we flock to theatres and spend hours binging entire TV series.

Would you believe me if I told you that one function in your business follows the same process as films and has the same power to engage its audience? Well, it exists, and it’s called marketing.

Ask any passionate marketer and they will tell you that marketing is an art. An art that requires creative marketers to weave narratives that address the pain points of consumers. 

They would also tell you that the process is all about exploring the relationships between an action and its effect, just like in movies or TV shows.

While traditional marketing involves a lot of guesswork and trial and error, this process does not work in the contemporary market. In the modern business landscape—in which one wrong move can lead to significant ramifications—guesswork and trial and error is not enough. Marketers will need more than a good hunch to succeed in the market.

To be more precise, marketers need the power of data analytics to be successful. With SAS visual analytics, you will have the tools you need to share a meaningful story with your audience.

In this post, we will explore how SAS visual analytics on Viya can help marketers improve their strategies.

SAS visual analytics on Viya can improve your understanding of relationships

One of the important skills any marketer can possess is understanding the relationship between the actions of a consumer and their reasons for performing those actions. This allows for the creation of impactful marketing strategies.

To do this, companies collect large amounts of data and analyse them to establish connections between each variable. All data analytics tools are great at doing this. Only some of them, however, present the data in a way that is easy to comprehend.

SAS visual analytics on Viya excels at presenting the insights in a digestible way by using visual data tools such as bar graphs, charts, heat maps and many more. By doing this, visual analytics tools allow marketers to understand the relationship between variables easily and make better marketing decisions.

Detailed customer profiles help create meaningful marketing messages

The success of a marketing campaign relies on its messaging. Marketers should focus on the main pain points of their audience through their messaging to make a meaningful impact. This is easier said than done.

To deliver an impactful message, marketers need to understand the preferences, behaviour, needs and wants of their target audience. Although it is possible to build comprehensive customer profiles using text-based data analytics tools, visual analytics makes the process simpler and faster.

With SAS visual analytics on Viya, marketers can centralise every piece of information they have about their customers in one visual profile. The advanced tools built into the platform makes presenting overall statistics of the target audience, or the individual profiles, easier.

Using these customer profiles, marketers can optimise their messaging to deliver a much larger impact. 

Automated prediction helps simulate marketing campaigns

In traditional marketing, marketers know the success of their campaigns only after they are taken live. This means that if bad marketing decisions are actioned, the marketing campaign will fail to connect with the audience, and there will be no way to prevent these events from taking place.

Advances in machine learning and data visualisation, however, allow marketers to simulate their marketing campaigns and predict the outcome. This helps marketers take a trial and error approach to their strategies without hurting their sales figures.

Embracing visual analytics can help improve the marketing function

Marketing is about manipulating consumer pain points to deliver a narrative that prompts them to follow up on a campaign’s call to action. 

In this day and age, to be successful, a marketing campaign must utilise the wealth of information available to them. SAS visual analytics on Viya can help marketers do just that.

With the power of data visualisation, marketers can deliver meaningful messages to connect with, and engage, audiences in the long term.

How predictive analytics can help businesses create a successful marketing strategy

To make your products or services successful in the market, you need to know how to market them. 

Predicting market trends, however, is easier said than done. Trends and customer preferences vary with time—the market is never set in stone.

That said, marketers can tackle this dynamic market by using the power of predictive data analytics, which involves using past and real-time data to predict future outcomes, helping marketers gear up for the future. 

In this post, let’s take a look at how predictive analytics can help marketers create successful marketing campaigns.

It helps you identify the right audience 

Marketers need to know who their target audience is before they start marketing their products and services. To be more precise, they need to have a deep understanding of their market—and predictive analytics can help.

With advancements in data collection techniques, large amounts of data can be collected, such as past sales figures, consumer behaviour and demographic data. The collected data can help businesses build consumer profiles that include consumer preferences, needs, and even the circumstances across every purchase that occurs.

With a clear picture of who their ideal customer is, marketers can predict the likelihood of success across their marketing strategies. 

Predictive analytics helps us develop marketing strategies

Just knowing who your customers are isn’t enough—you also need to know the best way to approach them and get them to notice your product or service.

Qualitative data, like age, gender and even race, can help marketers predict which kinds of marketing techniques will prove successful for a particular demographic. 

Studies show that 56% of all Australians research products and services online. Predictive analytics use quantitative data to help marketers predict how their target customers will react to their marketing tactics and how likely they are to purchase their offerings.

Predictive analytics helps marketers avoid mistakes

Marketing is like walking on a minefield—one wrong step, and it’s all over.

Sometimes, marketers try to experiment with different sales tactics, only to end up with a marketing failure on their hands. A failed marketing campaign means losing money and respect, something no marketer can afford to go through. 

If famous marketing failures of the past, like the introduction of New Coke by the Coca-Cola company back in 1985, have taught us anything, it’s that marketers should always look for red flags before going ahead with their campaigns.

Fortunately, with predictive analysis, marketers can use qualitative and quantitative data from their past sales and marketing campaigns to predict which strategies, approaches, and tactics will be successful and which won’t.

Marketers can improve a company’s relationship with its customers

Maintaining a good relationship with your customers is advantageous for any marketer—you want your customers to keep coming back for more. With predictive analytics, it’s much easier to maintain these mutually beneficial relationships.

Regular interactions provide plenty of information about each individual like their buying habits, tastes, preferences, and spending patterns. Using this data, marketers can now predict each customer’s journey and determine what kinds of products and services they may be interested in, in the future.

Knowing what a customer expects from you, and giving them what they want, can drive up revenue, loyalty and engagement in the long run—a hard-earned win for marketers in today’s market.

You don’t need a crystal ball to predict sales—you just need data analytics 

Predicting the future isn’t a thing of fiction nowadays, especially with all the technology that allows us to see what’s unfolding and what we can expect in the near and distant future.

Predictive data analytics has come a long way and with its insights, you can give your customers what they want, even before they know they want it.