For more than a decade, big data has been equated to big business. If a brand can gather and review customer information and turn it into actionable insights, it can ultimately expand its reach and engage its target audience more efficiently. The more consumer engagement a company receives, the more opportunities it creates to convert them to loyal paying customers. Unfortunately, as simple as this concept sounds, many entrepreneurs fail to harness the true power of customer data.
What Is Consumer Data?
It’s information provided by consumers and third-party sources ranging from names and addresses to purchasing behaviors and motivations. The data is supplied, collected, and stored through various interactions with a brand. These touch points can include the company website, eCommerce store, social media account, or even the checkout counter at a brick-and-mortar location.
How To Manage Customer Data
As you might imagine, receiving data from a variety of touch points can get out of hand quickly. When you have multiple platforms being used by various departments, valuable insights and thus lucrative opportunities are lost. Therefore, businesses should consider using a Customer Data Platform (CDP). It’s a central database that gathers and organizes consumer data in a way that enables marketers and business execs to make informed marketing predictions.
How Customer Data Enhances Marketing
When a brand can develop a marketing campaign using insights from consumer data, it’s called data-driven or CDP marketing. Essentially, because you have access to relevant details about your target audience, you can use this to develop engaging content and strategies to get people interacting with your brand. Continue reading for a few more advantages.
Stronger Consumer Profiles
You can’t know everything there is to know about a customer. Ultimately, you have no idea how they will behave or what it takes to make them take action. A marketer’s job is to make educated predictions that come close to reality. When they have tools like a CDP at their disposal, marketing teams can use the information they have to make solid predictions and build profiles around their audiences.
Better Segmenting
As you know, no one customer is alike. Be that as it may, trying to create a marketing strategy to accommodate every individual would be tedious, if not impossible. That’s where segmenting comes into play. Marketers often separate consumers into groups to develop a more realistic profile.
The more information you have on your target audience, the easier it is to segment them into groups to develop stronger marketing campaigns. For instance, separating your audience by their geographical location is broad, but using data like location, age, race, or income levels can help you make more efficient groups.
Personalized Experiences
When it comes to customer engagement, experiences are a top priority. Today’s consumers prefer to interact and conduct business with brands with some connection and a level of understanding about their specific needs and desires. If you’re sending them advertisements, emails, blogs, or social media posts that have no meaning to them, they’ll turn to your competitors.
CDP marketing provides a more personalized experience for the consumer. By analyzing historical purchasing decisions and behavioral patterns, marketing experts can make predictions and develop more efficient campaigns.
For example, if you have a customer that generally purchases body wash every month, sending out a promotional offer a few weeks before they would typically buy more increases the chances of a sale. It tells the customer that you pay attention to their needs and rewards them for their loyalty. As a result, they’ll not only continue doing business with you but may also recommend you to others.
Customers are the very foundation of successful businesses. If brands fail to meet the needs of their target audiences and create a positive experience from marketing to sales, it will ultimately lead to their demise. By using concepts such as CDP marketing, companies can harness the power of data to develop or enhance their advertising efforts to attract audiences, generate leads, and convert sales.
