Predictive Analytics for Startups: Opportunities Abound

While success doesn’t come easy for most start ups (unless of course you have played all the right cards); most startups see a dead end within a few months of starting. 

In many cases, the reasons for this early shut down are – ambiguity of goals and objectives, inability to implement the ideas effectively, creating the right market and finding the right customers, and of course lack of funds.

 How, then can start-up entrepreneurs avoid running into such a situation? 

Technology, in particular, “Predictive Analytics” is the answer says Martin Zwilling, founder and CEO of Startup Professionals. He says, “Predictive analytics uses data patterns to make forward-looking predictions that guide you to where you should go next. This is a whole new world for start-ups seeking enterprise application opportunities, as well as social media trend challenges”.

It is imperative for startups to be particularly be sure of their next several steps after inception; Predictive Analytics fits the bill perfectly here by keeping startups educated and informed about these business aspects – how their market is going to behave over the coming months, who would want their products and services the most and why, what are their competitors up to; what should they be prepared for.

       Zwilling lists the following “creative ways” in which startups can leverage Predictive Analytics: 

            Identify and target customers correctly:

Use Predictive Analytics to consolidate what Zwilling calls a single view of the customer; based on which you can improve your promotional and marketing strategies aiming the right product to the right customer with the right needs.

Manage your investment risks:

As a startup, you will be often skeptical and apprehensive while making new investments for your startup’s growth. Predictive Analytics minimizes those risks by giving you accurate details of how your choices are currently positioned now and how are likely to do in future, thereby helping you decide if your investment choices are worthy or not.

            Customer retention: 

I have spoken about this at length here. And Zwilling only strengthens my opinion that Predictive Analytics helps organizations, especially start ups to identify and resolve the causes for customer attrition. 

            Fraud detection: 

Startups in the BFSI sector can use Predictive Analytics to identify faulty transactions, fraudulent customers, improve underwriting, assess a customer’s financial profile, minimize false insurance claims and even bust false identities.

To know how Shout Analytics’ Predictive Analysis capabilities can benefit your business, either startup or established, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

 

How Big Data Analytics Will Determine Future of Marketing and Sales: A McKinsey Report

In this era of Big Data where competition is fueled by your ability to harness the power of data in order to make it work for your business growth, the need of the hour for every brand and business organization is Analytics. In fact, a McKinsey report in the Forbes says that Big Data Analytics will determine how sales and marketing are conducted in the future.

One of the most important facets that the report highlighted was that gathering customer insights and converting that into critical business intelligence is inevitable for modern businesses. The report says, “The explosion in data and digital technologies has opened up an unprecedented array of insights into customer needs and behaviors”.

Thus, while businesses understand the importance of Big Data and Analytics, they are also making the smart move towards adopting Social Media Analytics tools for helping them make sense of their Big Data. According to the report, “Those (businesses) that use Big Data and analytics effectively show productivity rates and profitability that are 5-6 percent higher than those of their peers.” 

In other words, the report by McKinsey defines the success of organizations using Big Data to their wisdom to use analytics effectively. It says that such organizations are successful because they use analytics for the following:

  

a)      Identifying and pinpointing specifically the immense business building opportunities existing in the micromarkets.

b)      Understanding consumer decision journey and finding out what factors lead the consumer from starting with merely showing interest in ending up buying the product. Analytics are also used to spot reasons for and solve customer attrition. 
c)       Using analytics to create detailed customer profiles that include their specific likes, needs, wants and affiliations and use it to aim customers with perfectly targeted and often personalized marketing campaigns plays a crucial role in business success (increase sales by 10% and marketing ROI by 5-10 times). 

With regard to how competent must modern analytic tools be to successfully tackle the challenges of expanding data streams, McKinsey noted that that natural language processing, predictive and sentiment analytics (to decipher customer behavior) and “algorithmic marketing” will be the key components to look for in advanced analytics solutions.

We at Shout Analytics, take pride in the fact that our social media analytics solution fits the McKinsey description totally

To know more about our analytics capabilities or to find out Shout Analytics can help you in your Big Data analysis needs, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

What Features to Look For In a Social Media Monitoring and Analysis Tool?

As a business organization that is quite serious about its social presence and social media marketing efforts, you know that your business must harness the power of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics (SMM & SMA) tools. But, how do you zero-in on the best SMA tool available? Here are a few pointers that will help you decide this.

Look for these essential features in a SMA tool –

Monitoring and Measuring Capabilities:

One of the most crucial and basic rules of good social media marketing is listening to your customers and audience. The SMA tool that you choose must be able to assist you in effectively listening to your customer conversations, monitor it for negative and positive vibes for or against your brand, measure and quantify it to help you understand what those conversations mean for your brand’s success.

Competitor Analysis Capabilities:

Competition on social is cut-throat. To beat your competition on social, you must be empowered with a SMA tool that would help you analyze your brand’s position against your competitors through metric like Share of Voice, Social Mentions, and Rate of Engagement et al.

Sentiment Analysis and Predictive Analysis Capabilities:

You may have a successful business, but do you know how successful your brand is on the social media? Do you know how your customers react to your brand’s social media efforts? These are critical questions that are detrimental to your brand’s social reputation and overall success.

Hence, when choosing a social media monitoring and analytics tool for your business, always pick one that has the best to offer in terms of Sentiment and Predictive Analytics capabilities.

Reporting Capabilities:

Go for a SMA tool which will provide you with simple, yet detailed, summarized and insight-laden reports about your brand’s social standing. Through graphs, charts and illustrations, these reports must simplify the data gathered about your brand’s social standing through social listening, measuring and monitoring.

Help and Support:

Some of the best SMA tools are those that are easy to set up and user accessible – from the CEO and Market Researcher to the Community Manager. Similarly, find out if the vendors offer continued and periodic help and support post set-up for product introduction, troubleshooting and other related technicalities.

Our product, Shout Analytics is one such ideal social media monitoring and analytics tool that is endowed with advanced capabilities and scores high in all the above features.Write to us info@shoutanalytics.com for business solutions.

How successful Your Social Media Efforts Are? Find Out Using Social Media Analytics.

What does optimal social media engagement mean to your brand?

It is true that likes, shares, retweets, and number of fans are all factors indicating that people interested in your product/service are coming to your social page(s), spending time and doing some kind of an activity there. However, do these numbers tell you how many of those people who spent time on your page went on to actually become your customers?

Well, Social Media Analytics (SMA) tools tell you this. In fact, using these tools businesses can now know precisely; and how well positioned their social media engagement efforts are. Other benefits of these tools include the following:

1. Measure and Monitor Your Social Footsteps:

While the number of fans and followers you have is pretty obvious on your social page, using Social Media Analytics tools, you can analyze how much and how successful has your brand’s reach been on the social media. Based on this, you can widen your target market and reach out to more prospective customers, thus enabling you to measure and at the same time increase your social footsteps.

2. Gauge Your Share of Voice, Brand Awareness and Brand Reputation:

A few thousand likes would be an indicator that your products are growing in popularity. But, if organisations want to go beyond the number of likes and know how their brand’s/ product’s social reputation, brand awareness or Share of Voice (the amount of social conversations that their brand/product is generating as compared to their competitors) is affecting their business, then they have to rely on effective Social Media Analytics tools that measure, analyze and simplify these game changing factors.

3. Quantify the ROI of Your Social Engagement Efforts:

When organizations are setting aside huge amounts of money exclusively for their social media marketing, it is imperative for organizations to also keep track if the money spent has yielded the desired business success or not. Social Media Analytics tools assist social-conscious organizations to do just that. By allowing marketers to break down the success rate of customer engagement initiatives into precise numbers, these analytics tools helps organizations in quantifying the success of their social media engagement efforts. 

What do you think are the other benefits of Social Media Analytics tools in optimizing social media efforts of brands? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To learn more about Shout Analytics’ social media analytics capabilities, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Go by Analytics to get easy social reviews for your brand

Positive social media reviews can do wonders for brand reputation. Knowing this well, brand marketers strive to promote whatever positive mentions and reviews about their brands.But, did you know that there is an easier way to ensure that your brand gets maximum social reviews? The key as always is deeper customer engagement. Here are the top 3 ways to achieve this:

1)  Great content

Give your audience and fans plenty of interesting content to talk about. Give them opportunities to share your content on every social channel that you want to target. Urge and persuade them to say what they think about it. This way, you are not only engaging well with your audience but also ensuring that they say good things about you to their followers.

Never hesitate to apologize for unsatisfactory service that a customer complains about. Acknowledging your shortcomings will not cause any harm to your brand, but instead will help you score more brownie points over your competitors. And there’s a fair chance that the unsatisfied customer will rave about how quickly you resolved his problem on a review platform. Now, isn’t that good for your brand?

2) Great experience

It’s not just enough if you post great content for your social audience. It’s also equally important to offer them great experiences. Every visit to your social pages must be something to cherish and look forward to. The onus is on the brand’s marketing team to transform every social channel that the brand is utilizing into a destination for its audience.

Give your audiences something to take along every time they pay you a visit – this could be a small incentive, discounts, special offers, tips etc. Thank them for their patronage and generously share their content.

3) Great Relationship

If you practice the above two methods, you are sure to build great relationships with your fans, audience and influencers. This should ensure you positive social mentions and good reviews, even during a time of crisis.Another important aspect here is to harness the power of your influencers. Even a casual post or tweet saying something extremely positive about your brand can propel the brand’s standing.

Share your methods for enhancing customer engagement and positive social reviews in the comments below. And to know how Shout Analytics can help you achieve this, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

5 Types of Social Media Content that Your Audience Like

What types of social media content does your audience expect from you?

If you are one of those brands which struggle with developing social content that is just right for your brand’s audience in spite of having a clearly defined social media strategy in place, then read further. Below are 5 types of content that your audience would love to receive from you – 

     Contests and activities that seeks audience participation:

Your fans and followers love a little challenge here and there, especially if there are monetary or other types of rewards involved. 

      ‘Share’ and ‘Like’ Content:

If you want your audience to regularly visit your social pages and consume your content, then it is absolutely necessary that your contest is worthy of maximum likes and shares. When you create shareable content, you not only create an opportunity for your brand to get more visibility, but also allow your audience to increase their social interactions. 

      Custom Content:

When your brand stands for something, your audience also repeatedly come to your page to get regular product/industry specific updates from you. So give them that a plenty, but keep it simple and varied in nature. Using images, videos and info graphics regularly helps break the monotony of plain text. 

Reactions:

Show them that you are a brand with also has a humane nature. Express your solidarity with global or local events and developments that upholds human values and the general good of all citizens. Pay your homage to victims of tragedies; applaud achievements of sports persons, the armed forces, social workers, extraordinary individuals with extraordinary success stories. 

      Bloopers, humorous content:

This is especially perfect for film and media houses. Your fans always want to know what happens behind the scenes of movies and soaps. Post lots of photos with interesting captions or upload a video of retakes of a particular shot. Non entertainment brands can regularly post content showing how your product is manufactured or developed from scratch.

So, what other types of social media content would your audience like? Tell us in the comments below.