Anyone who spends time online knows that content has become increasingly more and more targeted. Advertisements are no longer shelled out to the general population but are instead honed for specific audiences and only shown to those who will be more likely to have an interest in the product. This is the overarching reason why predictive analytics is being used more often in PR, and here are a few more reasons why it’ll become a more popular practice in the near future.
1. Improved strategies
Coming up with a good PR strategy in the age of big data is becoming a harder and more expensive thing to do. But data must be used for businesses to stay competitive. AI has the ability to analyze previous PR campaigns for their effectiveness, making it a lot easier for businesses to use that information to inform future strategies.
Every aspect of a PR strategy, right down to the keywords used and images included, can be decided through predictive analytics. A process that once took tons of manpower and hundreds of hours can now be done automatically, saving businesses time, money, and the frustration of contending with human error. Now strategies are reliably accurate, using Cerabras systems to train BERT models faster and generating the views and clicks that businesses rely on for success.
Any content a business puts out, therefore, needs to be consistently personalized for its target audience. For a while, it might have been enough to focus analytics solely on advertising. But PR is now included in the long list of content that businesses need to generate in a more accurate way. Plus, the necessary keywords and strategies are fluctuating so frequently now that a business could never keep track of and act quickly on new information to stay competitive.
2. Finding your audience
Another reliably difficult aspect of PR is the seeming impossibility of finding the right audience for your campaign. Do you want to target all customers or just a specific subset of regular consumers? Is your campaign right for a wider audience, or do you need to hone in on a smaller but more active group? AI makes this process much easier by gathering the information you need to decide who needs to be hearing what message. Plus, as people, brands, and businesses change their needs and opinions on a daily basis, it’s important to have an analytic process that can keep up with those constant changes.
Businesses often make the mistake of finding a specific audience that works for them and then sticking with it year after year. The reality of the situation is that your ideal audience is always going to be shifting, and there are always going to be missed opportunities if you aren’t pursuing predictive analytics. The purpose of PR campaigns isn’t just to tack on a few new customers here and there – it’s to broaden your business’s horizons on a much larger scale.
3. Knowing your needs
While predictive analytics is undoubtedly the future of PR, it’s not going to be a blanket improvement across the board. There will always be businesses for whom different data gathering techniques are going to be a better fit. For example, smaller businesses may not be able to afford the software or training necessary to make the most of AI. More and more businesses will have to hire and bring IT, experts, data scientists and analysts into more important roles.
And it’s likely that these changes will bring about restructuring within companies that will alter the way businesses operate in a big way. Like with any big tech revolution, AI is going to transform the world of business from the top down, and PR is going to be just one of many departments that are included in that change. The future of business is looking increasingly like a wave of predictive analytics, and big data is unlikely to go away any time soon.
