Customer Data Collection Shapes Your Marketing Strategy

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Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumers (B2C) companies adopt different methods to publicize their products or services in order to promote the brand and gain maximum profit from it. Companies try to put in an effort and come up with innovate ways to bring out the views of customers so as to gauge what is the market status of their product or service.

Methods like customer surveys, product reviews on site or personalized review of customers on social media, targeting a specific group of audience to understand the trends, Qualitative research and more alike; are some of the ways to understand the market trends through customer reviews. Increasing online customer reviews create a state of dilemma in retailer’s mind about which reviews are correct and which are not. So by opting for third party market research surveys, do you seriously think you are building a high-end marketing strategy or just gathering information of customers which may or may not be useful?

Well, to know the answer to this, answering several why, how, which and what is important. This will clear doubts of whether survey data collection is just a data collection instrument or a real marketing strategy.

Why is it important to collect customer data?

Millennials are now spending most of their time online and indirectly contributing to gather data by heaps and bounds. Collecting customer data can turn out to be the single most important key to your marketing strategy. Without data, you’re marketing blindly, hoping to reach your target audience or persona. Many marketing teams collect data and don’t know if they are collecting it from a reliable and authentic source. It can be a social media login or an email sign up or purchase history or feedback forms, customers are indirectly providing you valuable insights.

If you wish to succeed in meeting customer requirements you should be sure of what information is been collected by you. Customers crave for personalization and thus by collecting their personalized data to derive personalization strategies will make further help you collect their information quickly and easily. These are all first-party data which is like the data collected directly from “target audience”. The prevalence of first-party data is low but it is one of the most preferred ones by the majority of marketers. Also, collecting first-party data provides the richest, highest quality insights into consumer behavior. After all data collection is the stepping stone for data analysis.

How does customer data analysis benefit your business strategy?

When it comes to measuring the success of company factors like customer base are first taken into consideration and then comes the sales graph and the company’s bottom line. And yes, all this are important indicators for measuring the growth of an organization. Do these figures explain who is buying your product? Do they explain when and why you gain or lose customers? All this can only be achieved through effectively analyzing the data collected.

Marketers can build their strategy based on the usage of various techniques like:

  • Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a strategy which can help you create a simple and effective questionnaire and thereby measure customer loyalty through it. You can make informed decisions making use of these the results.
  • Conceptual analysis: When the product is in trial phase or a development phase, the genuine feedback of customers is very essential as this can shape your ideas and take you to a more fruitful direction. This is a strategy that saves a lot of time and money before product launch.
  • Feedback implementation: This is again a strategy to work on the feedback given by customers, to show them that you work upon their needs and are making adequate efforts to reduce the negative aspects of the product.

Which criteria’s can decide is it an actionable data or not?

The best surveys are the one taken online as there is no hesitation to answer; whatever is there in their mind is been stamped on the webpage. Creation of online survey and the questions attached to it is very important.

So when you design the questions you must be sure what vital points are to be considered:

  • Clarity of audiences: which geography and which group of audiences to be targeted.
  • Crisp Questions: To the point questions must be asked to customers.
  • Right channels must be chosen: If it’s about advertising or media marketing you know that online channel is the best through which you can get more involvement.
  • Real-time results: The results must be real-time and effective so as there is no delay in implementation of what customers demanded.
  • Identifying key objectives: The output expected from a survey should be actionable, keeping key objectives in mind.

What benefit do you get in terms of marketing from online surveys?

Online surveys have the potential to deliver the right information and without wasting time and resources. Thus they are considered as the vital part of shaping any marketing strategy. You’ll find surveys being most useful for evaluating and refining content in your core marketing funnel or buying process. Qualitative survey is used more often across all survey models, to collect analyze and use data to formulate effective strategies.

In order to save time and build an effective marketing strategy you must keep certain features in mind like:

  • Process automation: Sending bulk emails, invites, reminders- everything can be easily managed if you chose to automate this process. You still have an easy access to the status of your invites, meeting op-outs, views etc.
  • Data scrutiny: The survey answers obtained from different platforms must be password protected in order to keep them private and operative.
  • Effective branding: In order to easily understand and build loyalty for your brand you could create a logo or brand image in the background so as to understand the survey was taken for which brand.
  • Compatible and real-time management: The surveys must be designed in a manner that they are compatible with each and every device and languages with integration to your social networks.

These were some useful features which can help you build effective marketing strategies and below are the benefits you acquire while using this:

  • Save on cost: While executing a survey the main aspect that you will come to understand is online surveys are relatively inexpensive. And if it’s online or mobile then the cost per survey is very less and even if you offer incentives to respondents, the cost of administering the paper survey will cost more.
  • Flexibility resulting in effective marketing: It does not depend on where the respondent is located only his views matter. Thinking of paper or face to face surveys won’t be feasible to be performed in terms of monetary issues. But online surveys, social media surveys, mobile surveys, or telephonic surveys can be easily performed even at the geographies which you don’t expect would take part normally.
  • Breaking the ice between marketers and customers: The anonymity of surveys allows respondents to answer with more candid and valid answers. To get the most accurate data, you need respondents to be as open and honest as possible with their answers. Surveys conducted anonymously provide an avenue for more honest and unambiguous responses than other types of research methodologies.

Final word:

By introducing online surveys to your business you will clearly have a closer look at what your customer thinks about your products or services. Well executed surveys will help you in making informed decisions and shape your marketing strategy. With the collected customer information you will now be able to offer improved services and products which proved that survey data collection is a tool for marketing strategy and not just an information collection instrument.

Chirag Shivalker
Chirag Shivalker is a content head at Hi-Tech BPO, a company thriving in the industry for more than two decades. He regularly writes about importance of data management for data analytics and the changing landscape of the business process management industry.

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