***Contributors Post***
Modern businesses collect a huge amount of data about themselves and their customers. Whenever you have an interaction with a customer, regardless of the nature of that interaction, you’re storing some kind of data. You also have a wealth of data about your own business operations to draw on. But this data revolution has happened so fast that a lot of businesses don’t know how to effectively make use of it, which is a big problem. If you know how to utilize all of that data properly, it can bring about massive improvements to your business. If you haven’t put much thought into it before now, these are some of the most important ways that your business should be using that data.
Master Data
One of the reasons that businesses struggle to manage and use the data that they hold is because there is simply so much of it and it’s spread all over the place. Most businesses have a lot of different software applications that they use. You’ll have one program that manages your marketing, one that manages sales, a different one for your accounts, and then you’ve got loads of emails and social media interactions as well. When your data is split between lots of different applications, it can be hard to use it to answer simple questions like, ‘which customers responded best to our recent marketing campaign.’ But if you can bring all of that data together, it’s a lot easier to use, that’s where master data comes in. A good master data management can bring information from all of those different applications together under some simple headings. For example, you can view all data that relates to your customers as a whole, which makes it easier to base decisions on it. It streamlines the process so you can start using that data to make improvements to the business.
Targeted Marketing
When you’re developing a marketing campaign, it’s important that you target it toward the right people. Data is such a big help here because it gives you such a good insight into your customer’s mindset. You can look at your previous campaigns and which aspects connected well with customers. When you’re trying to decide which digital marketing tools to use, knowing which of them offer a good return on investment and which don’t helps you to allocate resources effectively and reduces waste.
Developing New Products
The first step in developing a new product is identifying a gap that needs to be filled. You need a problem that you can create a solution for, and customer data can really help here. If you can see what kind of products your customers are buying from you and see where the gaps are, you can start developing new product lines to fill those gaps. You can look at social media posts and reviews of your products to see whether there are features or capabilities that people are asking for. You can also see which products aren’t connecting so well so you know what to avoid. Incorporating that data into your product design process will help you to create something that is more likely to resonate with customers.
Data is one of the best tools that you have at your disposal so it’s important that you make sure that you’re taking full advantage of it.