Takeaways: Improving the Marketing Process with Analytics

So, I hope you had fun. You ran through some numbers, ate your vegetables, did some predictive models, and you’re better of for that and you enjoyed it. And we’re going to see more of this and many of the modules that we’re going to look into. Now let’s recap as to what the analytics we looked at in Airbnb. When we started this module,

we talked about three kinds of analytics: descriptive, prescriptive and predictive. Now let’s start with descriptive. Descriptive is really about looking at historic information that Airbnb has on its website that looks into reports that says how often a property is rented, in which place, and why and what are happening in terms of some abnormalities in terms of rental rates over time. This is basically summarizing past information. Now we go up the level of intelligence into predictive and prescriptive models. In predictive models, we looked at how we take all the review sentiments, star ratings and property attributes to predict sales of a property.

And then in prescriptive, we are going to look at now that in Miami price is important, how can we optimize the price in Miami to improve the rental prospects of properties in Miami? So you can see how analytics allows us to improve the marketing planning process at different stages. Now in terms of takeaways from this module, I hope you take away that marketing is both an art and a science. Analytics provides marketing managers the opportunity to test intuition about marketing. We saw how without data, we may have said, “Well, reviews and the text in the reviews affects the rental prospects of all properties.” But the data said, “Wait a minute, that’s not the case.

It happens only in certain properties, in certain locations, not all the time.”. And insights from analytics can hence challenge our widely held assumptions. And because of this process, confidence in decisions that flows out of the marketing planning process is higher when we use marketing analytics. You should now be able to understand the marketing planning process, explain how data-driven decision-making impacts marketing, describe how Airbnb used analytics to improve its marketing strategy, apply the marketing planning process to address your marketing challenges, apply the analytics process to your marketing challenges.

So, we’re basically hoping that you understand the marketing planning process, understand how analytics affects the marketing planning process, and how you can use analytics to improve the way you address your marketing challenges.