In today's "data” driven marketing world, there is the temptation to confuse “data points” with an actual reflection of the customer or the voice of the customer. Data can be extremely helpful in getting a better understanding of the behavior of your customers and can contribute to constructing a more complete picture of your customer or their persona.
I have always maintained that marketing is part science and part art. The science part has grown exponentially with the addition of better database management, but I feel the art of creatively interpreting data into a genuine persona is frequently overlooked.
Data is of critical importance to every business. Having good, well-organized data is the starting point for gaining customer insight and measuring marketing effectiveness. With rapidly expanding access to more data, there's no excuse for any business, small or large, to not have data-driven customer insight and marketing effectiveness metrics. In working with entrepreneurial businesses, we frequently find that they gravitate towards operationally driven software, which doesn't always provide the kind of data manipulation which can provide marketing insight.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) is an acronym which is often not embraced by today's big data providers. Entrepreneurial businesses can take a lot of simple steps that will take them down the path of gaining good insight into their customers and ultimately their business. Here are some suggestions:
- When meeting with your software providers, spend a large portion of time looking into what type of information can be extracted from your software, not just how it assists you operationally.
- Emphasize to everyone who is responsible for entering customer information to complete all fields and most importantly, get an email address.
- Regularly generate reports aimed at understanding your customers' behavior, not just tracking revenue development.
- Test to see if your assumptions about your customers are actually proven by their behavior.
- Spend as much time as possible directly interacting with your customers to help provide you with a more rounded perspective from what you think the data is telling you. This could include: net promoter strategy, customer surveys or other customer feedback channels.
- Knowing everything about your customer does help set a profile of their habits related to your business, but making sure their expectations have been met and they are satisfied helps convert a customer into a loyal and frequent customer. (This is especially true for businesses that offer multiple services.)
Remember: data, and the insights it can provide, is an important first step, but you have to go deeper if you want to gain genuine understanding of the customer. With that understanding, you can craft more effective marketing, deliver better services, and get closer to that holy grail of customer loyalty.
