With all the uncertainty in the world, the desire to know what could happen in the future has never been stronger. Thankfully, predictive analytics—which had already been gaining importance in the content marketer’s toolkit—are on hand and are now essential for helping you mitigate this uncertainty, forecast the future of your content, and find a way forward with confidence.
What Is Predictive Analytics (in Simple Terms)?
As our global business environment becomes ever-increasingly data-driven and Big Data continues to grow hand over fist, more and more companies are leveraging predictive analytics to glean valuable insights. Such insights translate to a competitive advantage and can mean more money for their bottom line. The content marketing landscape is no exception.
A type of data analysis, predictive analytics, examines both historical and current data to forecast unknown and future events. The technique employs such tools and methods as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data mining, statistical algorithms and predictive modelling to make actionable predictions, identify risks and opportunities, and facilitate more informed decisions.
Create Better Content with Predictive Analytics
Of course, predictive analytics can’t foretell the future with absolute certainty, but it can help you paint a picture of expected behaviours and results—and then plan accordingly. Armed with this information, for example, content marketers can better tailor their messages to customers and optimise their campaigns.
The Rising Importance of Predictive Analytics
Again, for content marketing, predictive analytics is becoming increasingly important as businesses try to effectively plan for what’s around the next bend and to enhance their social media and marketing campaigns.
By combing through massive datasets and looking at earlier content and trends, predictive analytics can enable you to identify what content—topics, formats, messaging intent—is working (or not!).
AI’s Role in Predictive Analytics
Fortunately, platforms like Contrend—a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) content marketing platform—are making their way to the content-marketing market. These platforms help organizations create the best, most relevant content possible. They simplify and enhance your content plans by:
- Analyzing large, complex datasets concerning your audience needs
- Evaluating content performance and audience engagement
- Benchmarking engagement against that of competitors
- Pinpointing trends and bringing to light competitor strategy
- Identifying themes and content formats you should use going forward so you can lead the conversation.
Plus, with its predictive capabilities thanks to AI and ML technology and a proprietary Engagement Index (EI) metric (more on this below), the Contrend content-marketing platform is a step ahead of your run-of-the-mill content-management systems.
How to Predict Trends
With Contrend, we’ve taken a page from the book of securities and commodities trading to develop prediction on the platform. Traders use Donchian Channels to track high, low, and mean prices; identify trends; and ultimately predict future outcomes. From there stem recommendations to buy, sell, or hold.
Similarly, Contrend runs its own proprietary (and customisable) EI metric—a new way to measure audience-engagement levels (that is, content effectiveness) for a particular topic or format. Contrend takes regular snapshots of the EI and plots them to identify high, low, and median values; this creates Donchian Channel-like channels that enable the prediction of future audience content preferences. This way, we can recommend content that will increase engagement and predict the best future content that will drive lead generation, conversion, and sales.
Essentially, predictive analytics galvanises content marketers to be more forward-thinking and provides more meaningful, actionable insights, so you can compete in today’s—and tomorrow’s—fast-paced, data-driven digital age.
Ready to look into the content crystal ball and optimize your content strategy for the future? Get in touch to learn more about the integrated predictive analytics in Contrend.
