What is proactive marketing?

Proactive Marketing = Predictability and impact

Proactive marketing uses data to see what will contribute to positive growth. Being proactive means acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes. Proactive Marketing is much more than just a mindset. It is an analytical approach that allows marketing pros to be agile and data-driven, in real time, as well as adaptable to the ever-changing needs and wants of both current and future customers. It allows you to create more engaging opportunities and get more value out of each user on a more detailed level. It encompasses all forms of marketing, and focuses on building strategies with a detailed understanding of a campaign’s audience, impact, and metrics for success — before going forward with the actual campaign. In practice, being proactive means benchmarking in real-time, analyzing data on the go and optimizing campaigns for higher overall brand value. Use data to see what will contribute to positive growth, instead of reacting to data that shows your last campaign’s success or failure.

So how do I use Proactive Marketing?

Access Real Time Data

Use the data you already own – it’s your best resource. As valuable as it is, you have to stay on top of it.

Analytics dashboards make data visibility simpler. Set alerts for spikes and dips so that you can respond immediately.

Ensure you get the full picture – Website & Marketing together again

Make sure your website delivers on your marketing promises and is consistent across all aspects.

A/B Test

Email is a great place to be proactive by reacting quickly to trends you see and getting ahead of them by predicting what customers will enjoy next.

A/B Test the content of the email – Text only/with pictures/video/links. Test different products, subject lines, and send times to see what works best for future sending.

Make it personal
Nothing is more proactive than anticipating the needs of an individual customer. There are many different levels of personalization, but true personalization means observing an individual’s behavior—what they order, what they read, when they perform these actions, and how frequently—to predict what they’ll like at a specific time in a particular context. Segmentation is a good start to building more targeted campaigns.

Find opportunities to delight
As marketers get better and better at anticipating customers’ needs and targeting segments, some are arguing that we’re running the risk of being, well, boring. Nothing is quite as delightful and successful in driving loyalty as serendipity, otherwise known as “relevant discovery.” You could have editors continue to handpick pieces to send out, but their time is valuable—and there’s a smarter way…

Bring in the machines: predictive personalization at scale
Given enough data and time, a sharp person can predict the behaviors of a specific segment of customers. But if you want to proactively engage a diverse customer base at meaningful scale, you are going to need some help with all that data. You need technology that can rapidly personalize and disseminate content based on individual user behavior. You need technology that can help people find what they want before they even know they want it. And really, at the end of the day, your users deserve to be treated like individuals. Communicating with a segment of one requires a nuanced understanding of your customers, your content, and data across channels. In short, that means you need algorithms—big, hairy algorithms. Learn how artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming how marketers connect with customers and drive growth.

What are the benefits of Proactive Marketing?

• Minimizes campaign failure
• Stretch your marketing budget even further
• Improve competitive positioning
• Increase your efficiency in engaging your target audience
• Build and maintain strong brand awareness and loyalty
• Identify and address gaps in your data collection
• React quickly and intuitively to change and innovations
• Allows you to be agile, real-time, data-driven, and adaptable to the ever-changing space of what your customers could be seeking

What makes Proactive Marketing so important?

Marketers develop campaigns and look at the data and metrics to analyze how they did in order to improve the campaigns. 

Marketing has become more real-time, data-driven, and metrics focused, there are tools and platforms that will allow you to aim and then shoot for success. With proactive marketing, you can see what will attribute to more success in your campaigns, instead of reacting to data showing that your campaign failed. Being proactive allows for you to benchmark in real-time, analyze data on the fly, and optimize your campaigns to all ensure overall value for your brand. You’ll be able to see what will work, head in that direction, and optimize your marketing faster than your competition.

What do we do with all the data?

The more information you have at your fingertips, the more effectively you can gauge the success of your strategy.

Market shows that data quality, latency and lack of strategy are the biggest inhibitors in today's marketing landscape. Marketers who know their data and use it as a real-time feedback loop for long-term strategies will find themselves significantly ahead of their competition.

So, to tie all of these together, a proactive approach to insights gives marketers a longitudinal view of their competitive landscape, a dynamic understanding of their baseline metrics, and the analytical confidence to innovate within their campaign strategies. Using data to look backward is useful, but using data-driven proactive marketing to predict the future changes the game entirely.