Making Your Data Work for You

Your data represents a huge growth opportunity. As touch-points multiply, there is constant pressure to harness and extract value from countless customer interactions. The volume of data generated around the individual is growing exponentially – demographic, psychographic, transactional, social, promotional (online and offline), search, site visits, and email. This quantum of data is creating an unprecedented need to capture, store, and measure the right information. Unbridled amounts of data can create noise and confusion. Captured, relevant data can be enlightening.

Positively managed, your data is a powerful tool that can generate an explosion of insight into your customers’ choices, opinions, and preferences. By taking an analytical view, you can know who and where the consumers are, and glean insights that can create more meaningful and engaging communication that build resonace with your consumers. Companies that can manage, enrich, and enhance its data – transforming it into something that makes sense – will also make money. This can easily be done by creating single customer solutions that track and understand behaviour, which in turn aligns your business with customers’ ever-changing requirements.

Are You Accountable?

Some of your marketing budget is wasted. Do you know which part?

With customer fragmentation and the crisis of attention, great creative ideas can be wasted unless they are applied in the right channels. By combining marketing communications, media planning and buying, and data analytics under one roof, you can measure every cog in the machine. Now imagine how your business would perform if you could take this knowledge and use it to optimise every single element of your marketing mix. This is at the heart of digital data management. By knowing which creative ideas will drive engagement in what mix of channels, your marketing dollars will be used efficiently and effectively.

Effectiveness Through Analytics

To understand your customers’ path to purchase, you need to understand how their world relates to your product.

Operating in this data-rich and fragmented consumer space means that accountability and ROI have never been more important. In order to optimise allocation and deployment of your marketing spend, you need to generate measurable results and quantifiably justify your decisions. Analytics can be used effectively to cut through the data ‘noise’ and pinpoint what really drives your customers’ behaviour. As an example, for a fast food company we realised that 7.15 – 7.45am is the best time band to target breakfast specials using mobile marketing. This resulted in increased footfalls at the outlets.

Fundamental to the analytics process is a clear understanding of your business objectives and specifics of each marketing programme. Profiling, segmentation, conversion models, and response analysis are all new ways of framing data, resulting in robust, actionable insights that are measurable and immediate, helping you improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Thereby improving customer relationships, and identifying new markets and products.

Using Technology to Drive Growth

Each of your customers has a preferred way of being communicated with. By talking to them accordingly – whether it’s email, direct mail, SMS, or phone – and creating a real dialogue, you significantly improve your chances of marketing effectively to them.

Data can help you understand how, when, and why you should be getting in touch with your customers. Technology provides us with a wide range of tools to help manage and integrate your varied marketing communications. Whether it’s campaign management, business and marketing intelligence, or reporting and analytics, technology is the enabler that helps you execute and evaluate your marketing strategies.

As senior executives need better information to make strategic decisions that impact business, companies must take a fundamental shift and adopt a data- and analytics-based approach that will help them thrive in these challenging times. Importantly, this must go beyond basic methodology and measurement to include disciplined search for improved performance. Effort must be made to make data and analytics strategic assets in a company’s growth.

Take some time to think about your data. Are you managing it in a way that can really work for you?