Imagine being able to look into the future to make better business decisions. It almost seems too good to be true, right? Well, it’s not. It’s possible thanks to predictive analytics.
This is a newer technology powered by AI and machine learning that’s changing how businesses scale and grow. Want to see how? Keep reading.
What is predictive analytics?
Predictive analytics is like traditional analytics (Think of Google Analytics, for example) but kicked up a notch. It uses machine learning models to understand how an individual business operates to predict future outcomes.
It can be integrated into any campaign and used for predicting:
- Average customer lifetime value.
- Marketing and advertising campaigns.
- Finances and budgets.
- Potential up-sells and cross-sells.
- Quality control and assurance.
- Product lifecycles.
- Etc.
How predictive analytics can help scale companies
Let’s talk more about how predictive analytics can be used within your own business to improve how it scales and achieves growth.
1. Forecasting finances
Budgets, balance sheets, and income statements are the backbone of any good business. They determine growth, spending, and profitability—hence why it’s so important to optimize a company’s finances.
Predictable analytics is capable of analyzing an organization’s typical budget requirements, spending patterns, and similar financial traits. It then creates suggestions for improvements along with forecasts. Marketers use this information to reduce overspending, lower expenses, and streamline finances.
2. Forecasting marketing and advertising performance
Lots of time, energy, and capital are spent on marketing and advertising campaigns. These include PPC (Facebook Ads, for example), content marketing, SEO, and similar. Predictive analytics forecasts whether or not marketing efforts will pay off as intended.
Businesses can scale campaigns that are predicted to perform well and remove ones that won’t do good. This saves companies time, money, and ultimately allows them to pursue the highest ROI channels.
3. Predicting the most profitable customer profiles
A small group of customers tends to deliver the highest engagement and ROI. Segmenting customers, for this reason, is very important for any digital business. While organizations do this manually, predictive analytic solutions automate the entire process.
They analyze a company’s sales, customers, and related behavior to determine which traits, demographics, and other data make up the most profitable customer profiles. Ads and marketing can then target this segment to maximize revenue.
4. Reducing and preventing churn
Some industries—especially SaaS and mobile apps–experience a high churn rate. This means that customers who sign up for a service or download an app will typically stop paying for it in the near future. It becomes a game of cat and mouse where you constantly acquiring new customers.
Predictive analytics finds where customers tend to drop off in the sales cycle and why. This gives brands a superpower to prevent the customer from churning by improving features, customer service, and user experience.
5. Modeling risk and security
Security risks manifest in many forms. A business needs to be prepared ahead of time or they risk breaches. Predictive analytics organizes massive amounts of data to find areas the most likely of risk and fraud. These often affect the bottom line of a business along with branding and how the public views them.
Security analysis and monitoring are typically time-consuming when approached manually. That creates one of the indirect benefits of predictive software: time-saving and automation. Professionals can tend to other important tasks while security analysis becomes hands-off.
Conclusion
There’s no shortage of technology that improves how we conduct business. Moreover, predictive analytics may be the one that influences how we do it forever. This is because it has the potential to forecast improvements in marketing, finance, security, and other areas automatically.
You’re going to run your business every day, why not save time and predict how actions are going to perform? Consider investing in a marketing security software that offers predictive analytics to reap all of the use cases we covered today.
