Interviews

Skewb Analytics’ focus on predictive analytics enables businesses to stay ahead of the curve

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sandeep Pandey, Founder and CEO of Skewb Analytics

 

  1. What kind of challenges do marketing teams usually face in terms of measuring their investments toward business growth? Can you throw some light on how does marketing analytics help in addressing these challenges?

Marketing teams usually struggle in measuring the marketing performance on business growth. As several marketing channels are leveraged to reach out to customers, it is difficult to measure the RoI (Return on Investment) of specific marketing channels. For instance, we see channels like email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, advertisement, and many others being employed to attract customers by businesses. So, it is difficult for marketing teams to determine which channels are driving the most ROI and how synergies between the channels work

Another difficulty that marketing teams face is to directly connect their campaigns with the business growth, especially when there are several touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Lastly, business growth gets influenced by several external factors like economic conditions, market trends, and competitor actions among others. So, it is challenging to attribute success to marketing efforts in a real-time environment.

From this perspective, marketing analytics can provide data-driven insights to guide decision-making. By leveraging data analytics and machine learning (ML) tools, marketing teams can develop path-to-purchase, Multivariate and multi-touch attribution models that account for all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. So, if several marketing channels are used, it enables businesses to know what is the level of impact of each channel on growth. Such accurate insights lead to better decision-making and targeted investment decisions for improving business growth. All-in-all, I want to highlight that marketing analytics can help marketing teams to analyze and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and optimize their investments toward business growth.

 

  1. How does Skewb Analytics enable businesses to make better marketing investment decisions? 

At Skewb Analytics, we realise that ever-evolving consumer behaviour and new advertising platforms require agile measurement solutions. Taking this into account, various solutions of Skewb are developed to ensure that clients leverage our AI-ML platform to continuously analyze the impact of their advertising and marketing content. Deep insights drawn from the platform, in turn, lead to a higher return on investment across all the touchpoints along with a better consumer experience and higher conversion rates.

 

  1. Marketing analytics is a large domain. Can you share more details about Skewb’s products and services within the analytics space? Also, please throw some light on your growth plans given the intense competition. 

Sure. We provide Digital and media analytics solutions to measure the impact of every media channel (and their attributes) on driving conversions, sales and profits. Within our larger marketing analytics platform, media and all other marketing inputs come together to show the role of price, trade initiatives, commercial investments, digital transformation, and others on business goals. This enables businesses to focus on those areas for driving higher deltas in growth. Apart from these solutions, we also provide CRM Analytics, Digital Analytics, Web Analytics, and Data Governance solutions.

As far as competition is concerned, I think the market is huge with space for everyone to grow. The global analytics market is currently pegged at around $20 billion. Since our inception, we are witnessing encouraging responses from clients towards our products and solutions. Given the rising adoption, we are looking at starting operations in two key geographies- the US and Europe, in this calendar year.

 

  1. How does your company leverage analytics for providing prescriptive insights and recommendations to businesses? Also, what kind of system architecture and data sources does Skewb Analytics work with?

We work with all the possible data sources including Ad platforms, CRM platforms, Retail audit, Research data, Macro-economic data along with all the category trends and social data. As companies are looking at the collaborative impact of different channels and their synergy effects to give prescriptive solutions, we effectively deliver these services for maximum impact.

 

  1. What role do AI/ML, CDP (customer data platforms) and emerging technologies play in delivering marketing analytics solutions? How teams and people can leverage their applications to improve predictive accuracy? 

AI/ML and CDP/Emerging-Tech play a critical role in delivering marketing analytics solutions. It enables teams and people to analyse large and complex data sets from multiple sources, identifies patterns and trends, and generate insights into customer behaviour and preferences. Turnaround times (TATs) across stages, right from finding the right target groups to creatives to leads to conversion, have reduced significantly and have become more real-time with the advancement in CRM technologies.

 

  1. We have seen many disruptive technologies in AI & ML space making waves in recent times- ChatGPT for instance. Can you share more about recent advances in AI which have a significant impact on the marketing analytics Industry? Also, please share how Skewb empowers its analytics suite by leveraging AI/ML to build the industry’s first SaaS offering in the prescriptive analytics space. 

Recent advances in emerging technologies, especially AI or Generative AIs such as Chat GPT and other language models (like NLP), auto-personalization, and real-time content generation, have significantly changed the course of real-time predictive and prescriptive analytics. Therefore, such innovation has a significant impact on the marketing analytics industry, specifically in building real-time sales forecasts, CRM, and personalized targeting along with its optimized deployment and measurement.

As a SaaS provider, Skewb Analytics specializes in prescriptive analytics solutions for its clients. Our analytics suite is powered by AI/ML and offers personalized recommendations to clients based on their specific business needs and goals.

 

  1. Before entering into more technology applications that are behind building Skewb Analytics, we want to understand as an entrepreneur, what inspired you to leave a global leadership role to start your start analytics company? Do you have a larger objective of transforming this industry from your solution? 

Most of the marketing analytics providers sell their services as consulting solutioning but I see the huge scope of SaaS in the prescriptive analytics space. Despite so much development in digital and technology infrastructure, I didn’t see marketers getting the solutions at the click of a button. That’s what gave me the motivation to jump into building Skewb Analytics for solving bigger marketing challenges.

 

  1. What do clients choose between in-housing and engaging with external marketing analytics firms? What are your thoughts on this matter?

Actually, it depends. Managing and maintaining an in-house solution team requires a dedicated and research innovation setup, which is not the main business of many organizations. Though almost all organizations maintain large customer data and would like to use this to make data-driven decisions, the choice between in-housing and engaging with external marketing analytics firms is influenced by many factors. The size of the organization and available resources, the goals and requirements of the analytics programme, along with the expertise and experience of the organization’s staff are some of the parameters that are considered. Depending on these factors, some companies may opt for a hybrid model which combines both in-house and external resources to leverage the advantages of each option. Some of the DTC (Direct to Consumer) or Tech companies are going for in-housing but they get the external analytics teams integrated with their processes and their teams.

 

  1. In this digital-first world, businesses are treating data privacy & security as the most important part of their processes. What measures do you have with regard to data safety and privacy as you handle huge amounts of client data?

At Skewb Analytics, we provide a highly evolved AI modeling platform for clients’ media effectiveness measurement and optimization strategy. We do not take any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) from our customers or store client and customer-sensitive data. Nevertheless, we understand the importance of our client’s business-sensitive information. Therefore, our product security protocols are built with a multi-layered approach that involves implementing a range of technical and administrative measures to minimize the risk of data breaches and protect sensitive data.

We also allow clients to choose from multi-deployment models- owned and hybrid solutions that enable them to host the platform on their ecosystem and do not allow any data to flow out. For others, we deploy a multi-layer security approach, which includes encryption, access controls, regular software updates, and patches & multi-factor authentication among others.

Leave a Response