By: Mallory Mast, Product Leader, Resonate
Broad targeting looks efficient on paper—big audiences, big reach—but it bleeds budget in practice. You pay for impressions on people who won’t convert, retarget users who’ve already checked out, and watch CAC creep up while results stall. The core problem isn’t channel or creative—it’s precision. When you’re flying with a partial view of the customer journey, decisions turn into guesswork and spend drifts to the wrong people. Predictive analytics changes that by using dynamic, real-world signals to pinpoint who’s ready to act and who’s at risk of leaving—so you can stop wasting money on the wrong reach and start directing budget where it moves the needle.
1.Start with better context than what’s inside your four walls
What you already know—site visits, emails, purchases—is useful but incomplete. Most intent happens elsewhere: research, comparisons, category reading, price checking. If your targeting strategy starts (and ends) with internal data, you’ll keep paying for broad audiences and “maybes.” Begin with broader context: bring in external behaviors and category signals so you can assemble verified lists of real people who match the moments you care about (ready to buy, likely to renew, at risk to leave). This widens the qualified net and sharpens where spend goes.
2.Fresh beats perfect: keep inputs and audiences current
Intent and risk change fast. Stale inputs create stale audiences—and wasted impressions. Too much of what most teams “know” comes from yesterday’s signals: last purchase, last site visit, last email click. Those are lagging indicators of what happened with your brand, not leading indicators of what they’re interested in right now. Build “freshness” into operations so your targets reflect today’s reality.
3. Defend and grow the base: get the lead time to act
The real pain isn’t just having time to respond before churn—it’s missing cross-sell and upsell windows until they’re already gone. Without foresight, you react after outcomes are set and waste budget on last-minute pushes or re-engaging customers that are already long gone. Hyper-targeting reads behavioral signals beyond your four walls early enough to create actionable lead time, so you can focus effort on customers who truly need attention now—prevent avoidable churn and capture high-probability expansion before the window closes.
Ready to learn more about how predictive intelligence can help your team uncover high-value customers, prevent churn, and drive real growth? Watch our recent webinar with Adweek to learn when to use prebuilt models vs. custom ones, and see how top brands are speeding up results and increasing ROI with predictive data. Watch here.
