In today’s multi-channel, hyper-connected world, businesses are demanding their marketing organizations deliver on three imperatives: First, marketers must find the most profitable growth opportunities. They need to efficiently eliminate noise and focus on the customers, segments and offers that will generate the most lucrative growth. Second. marketers must constantly take the best marketing actions. They have to orchestrate relevant, authentic customer experiences across the various touchpoints in their customers’ journey — at the right time, right place, right context. Third, marketers must maximize cross-business impact. They are increasingly called to achieve overall organizational goals (not just marketing), while meeting customer needs.

However, with the volume, velocity, and variety of data skyrocketing, these three marketing imperatives become even more daunting, and make it even more critical to get timely insights so that marketers can make quicker decisions in an ever-shrinking window of opportunity. It is not just about taking action on complex issues, but taking better actions faster. This is where high-performance analytics (HPA) start to pay off. Technologies that co-locate the data and analytics will become even more indispensable in achieving marketing speed, efficiency, and accuracy.

Here are the top five ways high-performance analytics can provide immediate marketing benefits:

1. Faster, more sophisticated, effective segmentation – With HPA, you can look at all of the data instead of just a sample. In segmenting for campaigns, control or sample groups can be eliminated and segmentation tests can be run against the entire populations in order to determine the best campaign interaction methods. Currently, marketing analysts refer to a sample and derive the key attributes that potentially define a group or segment. Samples then undergo A/B testing to determine which ones provided the greatest lift when making offers.
 
With HPA you can skip the process of extracting a sample and create segments based on the entire data population. HPA gives the ability to extract more robust, precise segments from the start. While further A/B testing could be done on smaller group, marketers would have saved a huge step (extracting a sample) and improved the accuracy of their segmentation process.

2. Real-time, relevant next-best customer actions or offers – Using HPA, much higher numbers of offers and interaction decisions can be processed and determined at one point in time. These offers/decisions can then be queued appropriately and sent instantly to inbound or outbound offer channels such as the call center, customer service agents, campaigns, etc. This results in a more relevant offer or customer interaction surfacing at the “point of need” in real-time.

3. Instant deployment and management of marketing models that give you a sustainable advantage – Marketing models (such as pricing, markdowns, offers, special subscriptions, marketing mix, segmentation, etc.) are constantly being changed and updated due to differences in variance, thresholds, and limits companies place on customer segments prior to campaign execution.With HPA, marketers can not only manage multiple models, but also deploy them with greater speed and accuracy. This allows companies to quickly and efficiently update their numerous models without submitting a slow overnight batch update process. The results: uncover hidden customer opportunities faster, beat the competition, and ensure brand differentiation.

4. 1:1 real-time experiences to bolster brand connections – With HPA, massive amounts of Web behavior data is collected, integrated and analyzed much more quickly, and thus presented to the offer or interaction engine more speedily. The outcome is more precise, real-time interactions with consumers at the “point of need.”

5. Optimized marketing for broader business impact – When the optimal offer or campaign for a customer is determined via marketing optimization – an algorithm is executed using analytics. With HPA’s parallel processing speeds, this optimization computation can be done more quickly and efficiently than in the past. Now businesses can not only determine the customer and financial impacts of their campaigns faster but also adapt instantaneously to market, competitive and customer changes.

At the end, the two key elements that drive all the scenarios I mentioned is that HPA enables businesses to execute their marketing FASTER and with more PRECISION. In today’s world, marketers must be fast to confidently seize new opportunities; to identify, manage, mitigate risks, and to deliver high-value, real-time engagements that matter to their customers. Marketers must also be precise in order to garner higher brand affinity and mind share of customer; create highly targeted, relevant, unique next actions and offers, and attain stronger customer loyalty and advocacy.

For examples of how high-performance analytics is being used in different industries, download this white paper.