With the explosion of big data, most businesses are acutely aware that they are sitting on a mountain of untapped data, struggling to get an in depth view of the customer. Along with the rise of social media, multiple disruptive forces like empowered consumers, shrinking budgets, insanely fast innovation cycles and an ever growing number of channels underscore the importance of making marketing informed by data easier.
Data empowered businesses anticipate customer needs across channels; they deliver the right product, the right service and the right price in real time when their customers need it.
Using Data to Anticipate Customer Needs
This is not a pie in the sky idea. Leading social businesses are integrating social media data into their business processes as well as into their entire ecosystem. All the intelligence and insights gained from interactions and the structured and unstructured information that is created from customer transaction to customer tweet is applied to addressing customer segments in a more discrete manner.
For example, a major consumer goods firm created a unified and secure collaboration space for employees and suppliers to increase responsiveness to new demands and improve customer satisfaction. A bank increased customer engagement by creating communities of interests for investment experts.
This social business approach also marks a shift in marketing from descriptive analytics focused on past action to predictive analytics enhanced by social data that forecasts customer behavior based on trends. Reaching customers can be so much sharper than just blindly betting on zip codes and demographics and the transition has already started.
Analytics Drive Results
According to a joint MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM Institute of Business Value study, organizations that excel in analytics outperform those who are just beginning to adopt analytics by a 3x factor. And top performers are more than 5.4 times more likely to use an analytic approach over intuition when making decisions. Being poised to tap into results of your online efforts allows you to repeat success and address underperforming campaigns to improve results.
What can we achieve from knowing what has happened AND what could happen based on social cues? Gaurav Gupta, IBM Worldwide Marketing Manager, Business Analytics and Optimization says “Marketing has ceased to be ‘just an art’ for some time now. Marketing is both art and science and “analytics” is the new science, which is acting as the game changer for companies today.”
There are three marketing areas where organizations are focused on and applying analytics: insight, strategy and engagement.
Companies need deep insight into customer behavior and needs — and the ability to anticipate and predict behavior to take immediate action.
These insights in turn help them develop and continue to refine their customer value strategy — how to enhance, extend and redefine value as viewed by the customer — and the key here is to do it profitably.
Leveraging that strategy to build customer and partner engagement, throughout the value chain and use technology to not just engage with your customers, but to forge personal relationships.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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