In an increasingly digital, competitive, and interconnected world, a business’s data is its most crucial asset and key differentiator for growth. As businesses strive to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace, a robust and reliable data strategy is vital to gain market leadership.
In fact, data-driven companies consistently outperform their peers, with a staggering:
- 58% higher likelihood of surpassing revenue targets compared to those who don’t use data in their decision-making processes.
- Reinforcing this, data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers and six times as likely to retain them.
From building a successful go-to-market strategy to using AI, reliable customer data makes or breaks key initiatives.
Let’s explore five practical ways businesses are maximizing their data to advance business goals in 2024 and beyond, plus five foundational pillars to build a successful data practice for your organization.
Data Reveals Investments to Be Most Successful
What do you need to do now to achieve your five-year plan? Who do you need to hire? What’s the best way to grow your customer base or enter new markets? How do you get a better bang from your marketing budget?
Your data holds the answer to these questions. A clear data-driven outlook helps executives and decision-makers allocate budgets more effectively. It facilitates investment in technologies and resources – hiring the right people and empowering them with the right tools to be successful.
By taking the time to make your data clean, organized, integrated, and actionable, you can objectively look back to proactively move forward and confidently invest budget and resources to have the greatest impact.
Reliable Data Predicts Performance
By harnessing the predictive power of data, businesses can anticipate trends, assess strategies, and maintain a proactive, rather than reactive stance. They can objectively identify the campaigns and tactics most likely to succeed and quickly pivot if activities underperform.
At its simplest, knowing what worked or didn’t work and why, tells you how to adjust your approach ongoing for better results.
For instance, a retail company can analyze historical sales data to predict consumer demand for certain products, enabling them to stock up on popular items and avoid stockouts.
Similarly, a SaaS company can build a forecasting model to measure activity and user adoption signals to predict customer churn.
This foresight enables businesses to stay flexible and responsive to real-time market behavior to improve performance across all aspects of the business.
Experimentation Data Optimizes Results
Optimization is all about making continual improvements.
To consistently improve, businesses must experiment with different marketing strategies, measure their effectiveness in real-time, and adjust based on key performance indicators (KPIs).
For instance, an e-commerce website might A/B test different promo banners placed at the top of the site to determine which one leads to higher conversion rates. Banners differentiators could be color schematics, sale offering, CTA language, etc. By testing different options and analyzing results, they learn techniques to incrementally improve results for their unique audience.
Test everything. Apply the learnings to other areas of your marketing strategy and business for a reliable, continuous optimization strategy.
Like the Stars, Data Aligns Sales and Marketing
At its core, customer data provides sales and marketing teams invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends, to tailor strategies for maximum impact.
Using data points like customer demographics, recent activity, behaviors, preferences, and past performance allows marketers and sales to design campaigns and pitches that resonate deeply with their target audience.
By analyzing data on customer responses and conversions, both teams can refine their approach, for instance prioritizing “hot accounts,” or repurposing high-performing campaigns, focusing on techniques that yield better results.
Customer data empowers sales and marketing teams to operate more effectively and efficiently, leading to better business outcomes. The result is increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, enhanced business growth.
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Data Fuels AI to Accelerate Business Goals
AI provides businesses a significant competitive edge, accelerating speed-to-market and increasing growth by up to 25% for businesses using it. AI is, of course, only as powerful as the data fueling it.
For example, a company can use AI to analyze customer data, forecast sales trends, pinpoint lucrative customer segments, and refine marketing and pricing strategies. They can create and distribute the right personalized content to get their message in front of those customer segments faster, improving engagement and marketing success.
When you mix smart AI with good customer data, you’ve got a winning recipe for better, more compelling customer experiences and marketing performance.
Five Foundational Pillars to Set Up Your Company as a Data-Lead Organization
Embedding data into all aspects of business operations doesn’t happen overnight. You must empower your teams with the right training, technology, and processes to standardize and act on data – it’s an overall culture shift.
Build a better analytics practice and data-driven culture with these five fundamentals:
1. Set Data Hygiene and Management Standards
We cannot overly emphasize enough the importance of clean data. It’s essential to routinely purge redundant or outdated information, maintain a strict data governance process, comply with regulations and data privacy laws, and ensure integration across platforms.
You could devise the most sophisticated data-driven strategies, but if the data itself is outdated or incorrect, it could lead to misguided decisions, ineffective marketing campaigns, wasted marketing spend, and poor customer experiences.
2. Integrate Your Data
Integration is key.
Bringing together data from different departments and platforms provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s overall business landscape. This facilitates better decision-making, as every dollar spent can be tracked and linked to its impact.
By breaking down silos and integrating your data, everyone from marketing, sales, and executive teams gains visibility into business health, operational efficiencies, and sales opportunities.
3. Build the Right Data Teams
Optimizing data management requires skilled team members to take ownership of this critical asset.
Luckily, you don’t need a data scientist on-staff to maximize your data. Many technologies streamline simple data management practices to empower businesses at all levels of analytics sophistication to act on their data.
Partner with a consultant to help you set up data standardization processes, integrate your data across systems and teams, build workflows and automations, create visualizations and forecasts, or analyze your data regularly to call out issues or untapped opportunities.
It may not make sense for many brands to invest in in-house resources, but investing in the data practice through a strategic partnership is imperative.
4. Invest in the Right Technology
Investing in a customer data platform (CDP) can streamline data ingestion and integration, unifying customer data across multiple data sources to build and activate customer strategies.
The primary goal of a CDP is to enable you to better understand your customers, in near real time, allowing marketers to create an enhanced customer experience across digital channels.
This bridges the gap between fragmented customer data sources, allowing deeper insights and more relevant experiences to promote customer engagement and growth.
Ultimately, you can manage, act-on, and deploy your data to the disparate tools that need it from a single, unified source-of-truth.
5. Share Data and Build an Experimentation Culture
Data shouldn’t only inform the team capturing it – it must be shared across teams for maximum impact.
Encourage your team members to run experiments to get more data – and build opportunities for that data to be shared across the organization.
It may sound trite, but giving team members permission and confidence to test-and-learn is the key to building an experimentation culture and making the most of every insight.
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Conclusion
The businesses that thrive in 2024 and beyond are those who judiciously wield the power of data, staying vigilant in data hygiene, embracing emergent technologies, and building a data-driven, experimentation culture into their overall organization.
By integrating a deep understanding of customer data into the DNA of their operations, businesses can unlock new opportunities, gain a competitive edge, and make better-informed decisions.
