3 Ways Brands Leverage Consumer Data in Their Go-to-Market Strategy

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Last year (2019) businesses invested49 billion U.S. dollarsin big data analytics. Data is fast becoming the “gold” of the information age and mining this data is becoming a major goal for brands and a competitive advantage. As consumers, we’re also constantly generating and sharing data, which makes the world data explore – this year (2020) it is expected to amount to59 zettabytes, a 44% year over year growth!

Marketing organizations leverage the wealth of data they can accumulate on each customer inCustomer Data Platforms (CDPs). These are powerful systems that marketers increasingly rely on to deliverpersonalized marketing campaignsthat can help them outperform their competitorsby 2.5X. The global CDP market is expected to grow fromUSD 2.4 billion in 2020to USD 10.3 billion by 2025.

The data collected in CDP systems is typically encompassing the following:

These data points are used by the CDP systems to put together consumer profiles that can be leveraged later to impact purchasing decisions. For example, “male of certain age group who recently purchased running shoes” may be offered a coupon to purchase other running gear, while a “women of the certain age group who recently purchased yoga pants” may be offered a coupon to purchase a yoga book.

This data is not only effective for encouraging purchasing decisions but is also great for retention of customers who subscribe to services or products. Netflix for exampleis leveraging big data to offercustomers more suitable content, which they estimate is saving them $1B a year in customer retention value.

Voice of the Customer data is basicallycustomer feedback dataprovided either directly to the brands (via channels such as call center, chat, surveys, etc.) or via publicly shared opinions online on social media, eCommerce sites, forums, blogs etc.

What is unique withVOC datais that it is unstructured data, which means it doesn’t have a specific format like a name or an address. This makes it challenging to analyze it as 2 different people can comment very differently on the same product or service. However this data is accounting for as much as90% of your overall dataand it contains valuable information that can help you understand your buyers, market and competitors. This includes things like:

With such rich data set there is value for multiple departments in the organization:

According to the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class VOC users achieve analmost 10x greaterincrease year-over-year in annual revenue. This is because VOC can better connect you with your customers across the customer journey.

The bottom line is that pays off to be customer-centric as you gain the insights you need to understand customer preferences, problems, and complaints.

According to McKinsey, organizations that leverage customer behavior data to generate behavioral insights outperform peers by85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin. These include the likes of Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

Customer behavior is a qualitative and quantitative observation of how customers interact with your company. Ideally, customers are segmented into buyer personas based on their common behaviors. Then, each group is observed at the stages on your customer journey to analyze how the personas interact with your company during the specific stage. This way the business gains insights into the different parameters that influence an audience.

Behavior can include things such as:

Because this is so eclectic and so business-specific, data sources can be very diversified. For example:

Behavioral data is typically associated with a specific customer but in most cases will be used to impact the next action as part of a group (persona) of customers or prospects.

Modern technology is nothing short of amazing. These days you don’t have just one way to know your customers better and to impact their decision making and buyer journey. You actually have 3 ways to leverage important data overachieve.

CDP covers your need to take into account customer history and actions as a way to predict the next purchase or need.

VOC leverages feedback data about your brand or others as a means to gain industry perspective on your brand’s pros and cons, but also on your products, services, pricing, etc.

Behavioral data adds the context of specific behaviors that customers take on your site, blog, app, eCommerce store, etc. as a way to gain a deeper understanding of their exact spot in the buying journey so you can continue to push them forward.

These are all great and all have a space on your shelf and great ROIs, all you need to do is implement, mix and match, and reap the rewards…and there are many!