When you come across a new data source or other solution that you’re certain will make your life easier and grow your bottom line, your first instinct probably isn’t to check the calendar. But in business, procurement is often officially limited to a specific “buying season,” a time of year aligned to planning, reporting, and budget cycles when companies evaluate new investments and allocate resources.
This can be a problem when the purchase your team needs is additional data or martech to understand your customer right now.
Unfortunately, your customers don’t live in sync with pre-determined buying cycles. In fact, that’s exactly why you’re looking for more consumer intelligence: to reach them now with better, more efficient campaigns. The longer you wait to make the investment, the more resources are wasted on a consumer you don’t really understand, and the longer you spend not growing revenue as quickly or as easily as you could.
Discretionary funds are typically available for these situations, but you’ll need to clearly articulate value to speed up the clock. To build the value case, you need to demonstrate the opportunities consumer intelligence provides and identify the risks of waiting until the next buying cycle. In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges of understanding your audiences, the risks of waiting or doing nothing, and how to create urgency for an investment by proving the value of customer intelligence.
When “Buying Time” Is the Wrong Time
While having a specific buying cycle works in many cases, when consumers are evolving as fast as they are right now, that rigidity can actually hamper revenue growth. Campaigns that were built on data that speaks to who customers were three months ago will always be behind. The consequences of this lag include:
- Higher customer churn rates as the needs and wants of consumers change faster than offerings, service, and loyalty programs can keep up
- Wasted marketing and media spend as money is thrown at the wrong customers in the wrong channels, leading to inefficiency and higher acquisition costs
- Difficulty in upsell due to misalignment between customer values and offerings
To keep up with changing consumers, you need to be able to answer a crucial question: Why? The ability to know why your customers act, buy, and re-buy with your brand or your clients’ brand creates a sound business case for consumer intelligence or martech investment on a faster timeline. Let’s take a look at the costs of doing nothing and how you can build a value case for consumer intelligence.
Do You Know Why Your Best Customers Buy?
Most brands can tell you who their best customers are. What they struggle to answer is something more basic: Why do these people buy from us instead of a competitor? And that gap is more expensive than most teams realize.
The Cost of Not Knowing
When you don’t understand what motivates your customers, what their underlying values are and why they make certain decisions, every decision downstream gets harder.
You write creative that describes your product or who you think your customer is rather than speaking to what real buyers actually want. You target audiences based on who bought before rather than who is ready to buy now. You run promotions hoping to drive volume without knowing whether price is even in the top– three reasons your customers chose you.
The results are costly:
- Wasted spend in places you can measure, and lost revenue in places you can’t
- Underperforming campaigns that target the right demographic but the wrong mindset
- Misread signals: For instance, seeing something as a creative or channel problem when it’s actually an issue of audience fit
There’s also a retention cost. Customers who bought for reasons you don’t understand are difficult to keep. You can’t reinforce the thing that drove the first purchase if you don’t know what it was. That’s how brands end up offering discounts to customers who would have stayed anyway or losing customers who needed something different entirely.
How Predictive Consumer Intelligence Closes Data and Revenue Gaps
Predictive consumer intelligence (PCI) goes beneath the surface layer of demographics and transaction history. It tells you what a customer values, what they’re concerned about in the near future, what they read, how they prioritize purchases and retailers, and what they’re looking for from the companies they do business with. It connects attitudes and motivations to not just observed behavior but future behaviors, so you can predict what the customer is going to do next and build a strategy based on the intangible “why.”
PCI tells you whether the consumer is showing signs of churn before they jump to a competitor, whether they’re ready to trade up to a higher-value product, and whether a specific message will resonate with them right now based on their mindset today.
4 Ways Predictive Consumer Intelligence Impacts Revenue Goals
The shift from descriptive to predictive changes what’s possible across the four key areas of the customer lifecycle:
- Customer acquisition. When you understand the motivations driving your next–best customers, you can find them without waiting for them to discover you on their own. Using predictive consumer intelligence, one direct mail provider achieved a 277% better targeting precision, which meant fewer wasted impressions and more budget reaching people who were actually ready to convert. This drives down the cost of acquisition, which positions your proposed investment as a business enabler rather than a new cost.
- Conversion rate. Knowing the why behind a purchase means your creative and messaging can speak to the specific driver of customer outcomes rather than the category benefit that’s being promoted in everyone else’s marketing. And when the message matches the motivation, conversion rates improve without requiring more spend.
- Customer retention. Customer churn costs US companies billions of dollars every year. But unfortunately, most retention strategies are reactive: They try to win someone back only after they’ve already churned. Predictive consumer intelligence lets you get ahead of churn by identifying which customers are showing early signals of disengagement based on shifts in their attitudes and behaviors rather than a missed purchase. That way, you can reach them before they’re gone with the right message at the right moment.
- Cross-sell and upsell. When you know what a customer values and what they’re likely to want next, you stop surfacing random product recommendations and start presenting offers with real relevance. That lift in average order value compounds over time.
What Incorporating PCI Looks Like in Practice
For brands, incorporating PCI into the strategy means walking into a planning cycle with a clear picture of which consumer segments are most likely to spend right now, what’s driving their decisions, and which messages will move them. It means building a strategy based on a data-backed model of who your best customers actually are.
For agencies, it means being able to tell a client something their competitors’ agencies cannot: not just who the audience is, but why they buy, what they’re likely to do next, and how the campaign should speak to both.
The Time to Start Using Predictive Consumer Intelligence Is Now
The brands and agencies that know the why behind their best customers’ behavior are making better decisions about where to grow, where to invest, and where to stop spending money that isn’t working. This could be you, and the sooner you make the change, the better.
Think about it this way: While buying time exists for a good reason, predictive consumer intelligence is an investment that drives the bottom line as soon as you begin to use it. The value of “now” provides a clear case for accelerating procurement cycles.
Want to learn more about how you can approach leadership in a way that gets them to open the company wallet? Read our blog on proving value in budget discussions. Ready to talk about your revenue goals and how PCI will empower you to meet them this year? Schedule a consultation with a Resonate data expert today.
