Move Over Social Analytics – Boost Social Media Marketing with Predictive Analytics
We marketers like to play it safe, don’t we? Frequently we only buy or sign up for the things that are most highly recommended by our peers? That’s why social media influencers and advocates play a vital role in how we are influenced, and they also, through their own social media campaigns, are so effective in influencing the buying decision of targeted customers. If you hope catch the attention of some major influencers’ attention and increase their engagement with your brand, mere social media analytics won’t necessarily give you the kind of date you need to be found in the right place at the right time.
That’s where “predictive analytics” can best fit the bill. Predictive analytics can give you the right insights to find and communicate with engaging messages to have them do the talking for your business. And voila!
What is Predictive analytics?
Predictive analytics is one type of analytics that will enable you actually to predict things about future prospects and events. None of it simple. But common practices include statistics, modeling, data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. All of these techniques enable marketers to observe and evaluate current trends. And based on these assessments, predictive analytics data can enable marketers to foresee prospects of gains or losses in the future.
Why use predictive analytics with social media?
Most social media and digital marketers still find themselves relying on the usual social media marketing analytics and practices. Approximately 70% of marketers still rely on posting social media ads. Some 65% were known to update their current events on business pages. And about 68% were found to listening to key influencers and prospective buyers and monitoring their activities on various social channels through targeted trends and hashtags. About 59% marketers were known to try to stand out above and beyond the fray to offer incentives and freebies in order to entice their brand advocates. At that, only 32% social media marketers have adopted a more advanced and intuitive form of predictive analytics data to map the right social media strategy for future based on trends in current activities.
Major reasons of predictive analytics adoption by social media marketers
Shiny new technologies in social media:
Predictive analytics is one of the newest technologies to be adopted by social media marketers. Even though we’ve heard the phrase quite a bit in recent years, “predictive analytics” are still a relatively new concept in social media scene, and it’s still in the early phase of application — and it is worthy of your efforts in measuring and making data-backed predictive analysis in finding and foreseeing key brand advocates’ interests and engagements. Also, the wide range of features and functionalities that predictive analytics offer are still mostly unknown to marketers, and many struggle to figure out the best uses of these tools, to find and foresee key brand advocates’ interests and the prospect of engaging them in meaningful ways.
Stay ahead of the competition
One of the many reasons why social media marketers should use predictive analytics technology is to predict the market well in advance, to devise effective strategies and to compose the best content for their targeted advocates, in short, to stay one-up from their competitors. Predictive analytics enables marketers to search for upcoming trends (such as those on Twitter or Instagram), before the trend becomes popular.
Today, most of marketers are following the same practices – monitoring the present trends and tags so that they can jump at the gun, tap the trend to communicate with their advocates and create campaigns around the trend. But with the appropriate predictive analytics at their disposal, they COULD be able to foresee trends and create strategies for campaigns and communications long before competitors could adapt their campaigns to those trends.
Predicting a trend would aid marketers in optimizing or creating new social media events, campaigns, and messages — and to be one of the first few brands to reach out in that way, especially to the targeted advocates who are following those trends.
That’s how your campaigns will become more appropriate and refined than those of your competitors who don’t have predictive insights into these trends. And as a result, your brand advocates and users will both appreciate your campaigns — you’ll be ready with the right news, data, stories, or videos, and you’ll be among the first to score well with those trends and those tags.
What prospects want from the brand?
Since the early days of digital marketing, marketers have been spending money to analyze one thing the most – what their customers want – and to be able to become the first few to deliver quality products and services that are best aligned to their customers’ needs. That’s why today’s smart social media marketers are tapping the potential of predictive analytics in their social media campaigns – to be able to respond to trends well ahead of time, and more importantly, ahead of competitors.
More brands than ever (who are engaged in social media marketing) are planning to adopt predictive analytics for these reasons. Where will you be on the curve?
Greater campaign success
Predictive analytics provide useful information in developing products, campaigns and services that have greater potential for success, than their competitors. They enable marketers figure out what kind of content and information customers and prospects are interested in that segment and also, they will be able to monitor changing tastes and preferences of customers based on the insights from predictive modeling.
What is the best time to use predictive analytics?
Capture market during holidays
Especially during special seasons, holidays and occasions, brands can foresee the type of content and incentives customers will be most attracted to – this analysis will be pure gold as all marketers try to lead with their best deals, products and content in their attempts to gain greater market share and sales revenue.
Holidays are the best time to explore new markets with a new lineup of offers and also to gain loyal customers once they gain confidence in their product and services – at that, predictive analysis tools help businesses measure and predict their upcoming interests in the next holiday season, based on the data on customers’ social media use and behavior, and how they are seeking recommendations from key influencers and their peers before making buying decision.
During their product launches:
Social insights obtained through predictive analytics can empower brands with loads of information that they can use in making the ideal and most engaging product launch plans. If your current (e.g. a VoIP product) product is aimed at small and medium business owners, you can make a search on predictive analytics tools by ‘#smallbusinesses’, ‘small office’, or VoIP to be able to reach for the right segment who are looking for the similar product and services on predictive analytics.
Special occasions:
Predictive analytics advice comes exceptionally handy in helping businesses to find out the market rush during special occasions and times of the year such as weddings, back-to-school, graduation days etc., when a specific segment of market becomes active in making purchases or calling the service providers in seeking support. Social searches made through predictive analytics tools will help search for the customers who need their kind of products and services.
Last but not least, brands can analyze customers’ sentiments by making use of predictive analytics for their social media campaigns. The sentiment analysis in predictive analytics tools takes in advanced technology, gives cues to help brands sort customers opinions whether that are “positive”, “negative”, or “neutral on social media scene. This insight aids in brands find out recent trends in consumers’ opinions on a specific product, service, campaigns or content.
What kinds of social media successes can you tell? Leave them in the comments below. Do you have questions about Predictive Analytics? Find out more. Call us at (408) 502 6765 or contact us via our social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get professional assistance.