Get Customer-savvy Instantly with Data Mashup

In many B2C businesses, the role of the marketing department and sales department is becoming more and more blurred. Marketers have essentially become an extension of the sales department. In fact, even in B2B where product or services are delivered digitally such as software as a service, cloud storage, mapping and such, a similar trend can be said to have happened. With the shift of marketing activities to digital media, many marketing activities are geared towards soliciting client’s interaction as opposed to just building brand awareness. 

With the ability for the target audience to response immediately, advertising agencies and marketing directors are demanding more and more feedback regarding their reach. Everyone is concerned if they are reaching their target audience effectively. The advent of result metrics such as click-through rate gives assurance to companies that their money is well spent. Feedback, however, are not insights.

The Science of Consumption

Whether offline or online, the customers’ decision to engage a certain service is dependant on the trust they have on a business; trust that the the latter will be able to fulfil their needs or desire. Increasing trust in customer increases repeated engagement and ultimately sales. The challenge is measuring that trust, because trust is difficult to quantify in absolutes.

Hence, we are seeing bigger companies’ setup department or engage in third party services called consumer science. Their goals to understand consumer choices. In tech, the focus will be on how much does consumer choices during their intereaction with a tech product leads to ultimate goals of the organisations: better trust means better mind share and ultimately, better profitability etc.

This is still not common for many organisations that can benefit from this analysis. Consumer science is a big spend. The truth is that there are certain indicators can lead you along, and there are products and services already available for such purposes.

A Bird’s Eye View

What organisations should be seeking first is the opportunity to integrate their customer analysis from an end-to-end perspective. Far too often, data are viewed in silos, and thus, we miss the opportunity to see the relationship between marketing activities and resulting sales, perceived product value or even brand mindshare.

The next would be to figure out how to present all that data mashup into a dashboard so it is easy to understand in a quick glance. Too much data creates clutter and information overload. Too little makes discovery of data a tedious process.

Solutions like Customer Data Platform (CDP) are just examples of how that data mashup of real live data can be implemented. Whether the CDP is developed inhouse through open source resources or through ready to use solutions like Meiro, such solutions can also be the solution to bridge to leverage on consumer science.

An Example

In a recent engagement, a client’s marketing team, in a B2B business, embarked on a project to integrate their EDM marketing activities analysis to sales figure. This is a logical first step. In an organisation sending 10-20k emails out every week, the work does pile up and having these data to integrate through a marketing analytics dashboard makes the task easier.

Given the fact that, the system should assist in mapping the mail recipients to the companies they belong to make the system much more invaluable, as it the companies and not the individuals who are being targetted. This would enable the client to review their end-customer product portfolio, their organisation size, usage pattern and fine-tune their EDM campaigns to suit their end-goal. A further step is being taken now to bring Google Analytics data into the mix. I would argue the need to add hashtags analysis and Facebook topic data to the data mashup.