Using customer data for marketing - the Yays and Nays
“Follow the customer, if they change, we change.” – Sir Terry Leahy, Former CEO Tesco
Whatever you do in your business should be centered around your customer, that is why the more you know about them the more you can meet their needs.
Taking on Sir Terry Leahy's mantra, how do you follow the customer to inform how your business changes?
One word, data!
These days data seems to form the basis for how everything is measured and informs your business' marketing activities.
So, what are some of the benefits of using customer data for marketing activities?
- Knowing the websites and social media platforms each customer spends time on as well as times and days they are most likely to be on them can help your marketing campaigns. Think about it, why are you posting on Facebook if your customer data shows they are frequenting Instagram?
- Data will give you insight into each customer, including what your customer is interested in, their lifestyle habits, and online habits. With this information, you can create marketing content that customers will be drawn to and therefore attract them to your business.
- More consistent messaging: when you use data, you can extend reach across many channels. Customer insights ensure messaging remains consistent and links up with your marketing strategy.
Insights that customer data delivers help not only to improve your marketing, but also your product offering and customer experience. This can then help in increasing sales and revenue. But, like everything, there are challenges to consider when using customer data.
- Data Integration: One reason that marketers have had a hard time turning consumer data into actionable information for marketing campaigns is they are collecting so many different metrics that do not immediately correlate.
- Breaking down silos: Because your data comes from a range of different channels (just think about your social media) it is often scattered. As a result, you get lots of data sets. To get by this challenge you will need to break those silos down and have all output in one place for ease of interpretation.
- Finding the right solutions: The choice of what data analytics tool to use can be overwhelming, but, keeping it as simple as you can may be the key to your success. This will be informed by what you want to achieve. A tool like Google Analytics could be all you need, and, with all the data you can shake a stick at, interpreting data using just this tool is a full-time job in itself.
Great blog post, Ciara! I don't think any of us can disagree that whatever you do in your business should be centered around your customer and this is why their data is so valuable. You've covered some key points here but what stands out most to me are the challenges that are often overlooked; data integration is difficult, there's a huge number of tools to choose from and don't get me started on the volume of data you can receive, how do you even begin to break it down? It's important to remember that while data can take your business to new heights, it can also bog you down if not collected, processed and used correctly.
ReplyDeleteCustomer data is very important for the growth of any business. Knowing who your customers are is vital for creating sales. If you don’t know your customers, how are you supposed to sell to them? You mentioned how it’s important to know what platforms your customers are on, peak times when they're online and how long they spend on your site. There’s no point posting on social channels at 4 am in the morning if your audience isn’t online until 8 am, it just wouldn’t make any sense. The downside to collecting customer data as you mentioned is there’s so much data being collected and finding the right solution may be difficult.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant, Ciara! Totally agree with you when you say customer data is, of course, customer focused. Or at least it should be and should make the customer experience better. Mind you ,obviously this benefits the company itself because the better the customer experience, the more sales you intend to get. As you mention, the downside of all this is that, no matter how great this data is for marketing purposes, it can also be hard do decipher. It can also be quite expensive as time and money needs to be pumped into this so because of this, I can also see how sometimes, marketing efforts get put on the long finger.
ReplyDeleteCiara, this is a great post. Sir Terry Leahy was at the forefront of using collecting customer data. They were one of first to introduce the Tesco Clubcard, as a company they were thinking about analysing what customers purchased and changes over time. Every offer can be tailored to the products that people are buying so they can be enticed back into the store and spend more. The point you make at the end ‘How you use it is the most important thing’ which is so key as it can be easy to get lose sight of what data to track and is important to the business.
ReplyDeleteCiara, I enjoyed reading your blog post, very informative for business owners that seem a little lost and are looking for advice on what data they should look to collect. Customer data is very important for growth and expansion of businesses. Knowing your customer and pre-empting their needs and wants is all taken from customer data - their history essentially! I do think businesses need to look into analytics software such as Google analytic or CRM systems to manage the data properly and get the best out of it.
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