3 Essential Facts About Predictive Analytics for Business
If you’re like most small business owners, you probably already thought about or tried to accomplish many things despite the fact that your team is reduced. You try to build a sales team or marketing team with few resources. At the same time, you have to juggle with revenue growth, raise funds, and expand your customer base. But there is one thing you must not lose the way – that is your data.
You use your data every day by giving them more or less important (and most companies do not care enough). Yet, they can have a considerable impact on the success of your business. So what can they help you?
Here are three things you must know about the data and its potential to transform your business.
1.Everyone has data
Some leaders say their data is not revealing because their business is not big enough. But this is a myth. Even in small companies, they are everywhere and you must take them into consideration. Actually, for any digital activity, whether that is a link click or a document download, will generate a digital footprint, and all those “footprints” can be valuable data for your business.
2.The data allow the interpretation of past activities
Companies that place importance on their data typically use to interpret the past. For example, the marketing team can see the number of visitors who viewed their website over a month, or the percentage of visitors who clicked on three pages before leaving the site. A sales manager can also see the number and average value of transactions made in the last quarter with a CRM application.
Such information is useful for making a diagnosis. This can help you to repeat your past successes and avoid missteps to come. However, you simply get a view of your past performance. The data does not tell you what will happen in the future.
3.Data and predictive analytics
The most advanced organizations are also concerned about is using predictive analytics technology to anticipate future and try to performance better than their competitors. Predictive analytics allows them to optimize their actions and future decisions. In this sense, predictive analysis can predict future trends and behaviours from these data.
Take the following operations as examples. Predictive analytics can help you determine:
- Which customer you should put as priority to work with?
- What are the contacts you need to target to a specific account?
- How and when prospects are likely to buy from you?
Prediction tools provide clarity to your sales and marketing teams to help your decision making. The analysis results will be the best information for your business decision because of they used million rows of real data from your business and were analyzed with “predictive intelligence”.
The different prediction models are designed to determine the changes or similarities based on the past purchasing patterns and highlight the most important ideas. For example, you can find:
- Which customers you should contact for sales first?
- What arguments highlighting for a particular client?
- What type of content and what form of communication will get the best engagement.
How to collect the data?
There are many technologies or specialized applications in web analytics, certainly the best known being Google Analytics. However, there are solutions with comparable features or those specializing in the study of competitors, social networks and your audience.
The amount of data is huge today because most of our activities leave a digital footprint. The analysis of these data will help you better understand your past actions (strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement) and then better act on your future through predictive analytics.
