Data is the raw material that powers successful businesses. Data-driven organizations are investing in big data and data analytics to get the visibility they need to make smart decisions based on facts instead of opinion and guesswork. From doctors using data to accurately diagnose diseases, to credit card companies using big data to prevent fraudulent transactions, data is rapidly transforming what’s possible across many different industries.From a marketing standpoint, data capture and the insights it provides are increasing the opportunities to target and market through digital. The buyer journey is generated and many times transacted online. It’s now all about personalization and relevancy; understanding where your audience was before they landed on your website and capturing what they are interested in when they are on your site. Being able to use this behavioral data to retarget and deliver relevant content when they are online, via email or on your website – that’s how you keep them engaged.
At Konica Minolta, we continuously refine our marketing technology stack and look at new technologies that can further drive engagement. Constantly reviewing marketing analytics helps us determine what type of marketing tactics are doing better than others, which pages on our website get more traffic and if our campaigns are converting an anonymous contact into a lead. Managing our marketing performance ensures we are engaged in the right marketing activities that will deliver results against our marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Customer segmentation is another area where data is used to help us identify correlations among client and dealer groups. Applying data science to understand look-a-like characteristics, like product and service mix or profitability, helps us to further refine our marketing strategies and programs through a customer led, data-driven approach.
We’ve also been evaluating solutions to aggregate data from various applications throughout the organization. Bringing together client data from enterprise applications and combining with online behavioral data brings together all client interactions to provide one unified view of the client. These Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are available as a tool for internal marketing teams, but many marketing agencies are now evolving to deliver this type of data service to convert anonymous web traffic into valuable leads. CDPs will become the future data source for delivering more personalized marketing and will help to guide the buyer along the digital client journey.
Beyond Marketing
According to PWC, ‘companies that are using data and analytics successfully are quick to spot opportunities, quick to assess ideas, and quick to test and learn from these experiences. They innovate continuously. They understand and embrace new business models. They use data and analytics as a core enabling capability.’ Using data to feed business strategy leads to better decision making and can help you gain a competitive advantage.
Data is not worth much if you can’t analyze it to make sense of it. Businesses that can clearly see and structure their data are best positioned to spot opportunities and generate insights that feed data-driven decisions. For example, clear visibility of data can power business intelligence that highlights areas of the business where you have room for improvement. Data-driven decision-making flows from the ability to collect raw information and then transform it into accurate and actionable insights.
Developing a data-driven culture is critical, but, before this can happen, you need to make sure you can see your data with clarity and context. After all, you can’t implement a successful data-driven strategy if it is based on misleading or inaccurate data. Strategic decisions can only be made if the data sources they are based on provide a full and reliable picture. The data also needs to be structured and categorized in a way that can release the full power of data analytics.
In addition to providing clear vision to assist data-driven decision making, the right technology helps data-driven organizations avoid wasted time processing and preparing data. This is an important consideration because, with the wrong infrastructure, there is a risk that data teams spend more time finding and organizing data than finding insights. Data integration prevents departmental, geographic and legacy application data silos that create manual data analysis. Data-driven strategies are fueled by the right data, that is integrated and democratized across the organization. Clearly defined business goals and strategy will help to determine what data should be leveraged to help to connect the dots and present real-time data insights.
Using a data-driven culture to your advantage
Data-driven decisions help businesses move away from a culture of intuition to focus on accuracy and precision. It’s far easier to influence stakeholders when you can back your opinions up with data and facts. Seeing your business with clarity is a powerful foundation for future success.
Data is applied in businesses of all shapes and sizes to help them work smarter, and your competitors are already investing in data analytics, big data, and predictive analytics solutions to streamline their operations. And, it’s not only business leaders who can benefit from data. Data can help with a lot of day-to-day tasks, routine decision making, business analytics, performance analysis and a whole lot more. With the right infrastructure in place, data can enable you and your team to do your best work and focus on what really matters.
You don’t always need to hire a dedicated data analytics team to perform ongoing data analysis for you. You also don’t need to spend a lot of time doing data analysis to analyze the data yourself. The right hardware and software infrastructure can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, whether you’re measuring print quality, working with big data, building a business analytics solution or developing an enterprise predictive analytics solution. The right solution can change everything and enable you and your team focus on more critical tasks. For example, instead of spending hours manually reviewing loan applications, banks now use data and sophisticated technology to process applications and calculate risk, freeing up people to focus on the bigger picture.
Don’t wait for your leaders to ask questions or suggest ideas: predict what you need, analyze what’s available, and propose a solution yourself. Working with the right technology will result in many opportunities to improve the way you work.
