Part 4 of a 6-part blog series.
You’re probably already analyzing market surveys to find member attributes and motivations, right? But did you know you can design a predictive model to automate this process AND create more engaging programs for your members?
Predictive analytics gives you power—power to have better programs, pricing, and marketing campaigns. Combining your data with the strength and agility of predictive models allows you to make more informed decisions and achieve better results.
In fact, predictive analytics is essentially the secret sauce to developing, managing, and scaling your association. If used properly, it can truly give you the real-time and predictive market intelligence you need to increase sign-ups, retention, and subsequent revenue.
Yet, while good analytics give forward-looking insight into your audience and competition, many associations struggle to leverage data in a meaningful way.
In order to be helpful for market and competitive analysis, the predictive analytics process first requires defining a need. For example, do you want to discover new growth areas? Optimize your offerings and pricing? Anticipate future industry disruption?
After defining your needs, you can then collect data from relevant sources like interviews and surveys. The data mining process will then prepare the data in one place for analysis. Next, analytics software mines through the prepared data and extracts predictive insights. These forward-gazing insights can then be used to drive decision-making.
So the goal here is to use the data you already collect to uncover actionable insights and smart “moves” to make.
So how is market and competitive analysis helpful for your association? It allows you to:
Now that you have a general idea of the importance of market intelligence, let’s take a deeper dive into how predictive analytics can help you:
Market intelligence analytics helps you understand the rational as well as the emotional appeal of your association’s offerings and services. You can then tailor your own offerings to match these desires and expectations of your members. Integrating this framework into your long-term strategic planning can help you search for new areas of growth as well.
You can even use predictive modeling, a tool used in predictive analytics, to forecast future outcomes using known results. So, essentially, you could build a model to help you understand and prepare for what could happen in the future.
Events Example: A great example of this is with events. Let’s say you have a membership event like a conference. The data you collect from the event (how many attendees, the most popular classes, average membership sales, etc.) can give you a baseline of information about what is engaging your membership. Then, you can use predictive analytics to identify not only what worked and what didn’t, but adjacent events and courses that can open up new revenue streams.
Market forecasting using analytics helps you ensure a sustainable competitive advantage.
It allows you to run one or more algorithms on specific data sets to come up with different possible outcomes. Such market intelligence methods can bring full transparency to the design, technical, and growth decisions of your competitors.
As you get a handle on the process, you can refine and optimize your search criteria to unlock new market opportunities as they arise and deliver even more targeted and impactful member experiences.
Through predictive intelligence, determining the direct relationship between demand and price for any program, product, or service offering becomes seamless.
No longer are you limited to matching offerings on a 1-to-1 basis. You can now program your predictive models to match by any attribute. This way you can be notified of any competitive offerings and pricing changes. By monitoring the pricing and details of similar offerings in the marketplace, you can ensure your programs are always competitive to better manage your revenue and achieve your organizational objectives.
In fact, predictive analytics is one of the most effective ways to model product pricing and revenue strategies.
With predictive analytics and modeling, it’s now easier than ever to prepare for emerging and disruptive technology and market changes.
Predictive market intelligence can essentially guide you through changes your association can make today to improve for tomorrow. Yet it also provides external market knowledge that lends predictive insights into emerging industry trends, expectations, and technologies. This foresight is a huge competitive advantage for any technology-focused organization with the know-how to manage it.
Using historical data and real-time trends, you can even create a model for forecasting negative market disruptors and then take preemptive actions to reduce their impact. Every innovation and forward-viewing change to your offerings can help you execute your strategic plan and invest in the long-term satisfaction of your members.
Your data is already providing the keys you need to grow your organization and become a powerful player in the association industry.
Find out more about how you can unlock those secrets with our free ebook, The Association Retention Playbook: The 5-Step DIY Membership Retention Strategy and Workbook.
Thomas Altman
