In today’s generation, marketing and branding are a must for any business, no matter how small or big. Mediums such as social media are vital catalysts for any brand to succeed since it becomes a direct way for companies to reach their audience and sell their products/services.
Business analytics is a powerful tool used in various facets of marketing. These include forecasting trends, understanding customer behavior, calculating the likeliness/probability of an event to occur, knowing where your customer comes from, etc.
All the above facets have a culmination step known as customer targeting. Here, Business analytics helps us acquire customer data, analyze it, derive insights, and leverage it to improve customer targeting.
What is Customer Targeting?
In simple terms, customer targeting is looking at people relevant to your brand and product/service you sell, seeing them as potential customers, and targeting them with your ads and campaigns to transform the lead into an actual customer.
Organizations usually have an internal sales and marketing funnel that maps the complete customer journey, from the first time they come across their ad/brand to when they make their first purchase. After this, they sustain that customer and ensure they return to the organization.
Companies have had various strategies to execute these funnels, but none of them were as efficient or accurate as of today’s methods. We’re in an era where tools such as business analytics can elevate our marketing strategies, sales funnels, and customer targeting to new heights.
If you’re a small business, startup, or a large company, this article is just for you. I will be taking you through how business analytics can help your company target customers better, increase the accuracy of targeting strategies, and thus generate more business.
How is Business Analytics Useful for Your Company?
Business analytics involves numerous tasks that can help you do everything mentioned in the above section. However, like in marketing, there are different facets to business analytics. Each of these has its use that can enhance customer targeting and increase your company’s business.
Some of those are listed-below:
Data Aggregation
This part essentially involves collecting data from all kinds of sources. This can be social media, information about your company’s website, sales data, etc. The idea is to gather all data of your customers and organize them in one place so that you don’t have to look at different platforms for different kinds of data. Instead, everything is right before you.
Data Mining
Once data aggregation is over, the process of mining begins. It is essentially looking at data sets for different kinds of information. For example, the information could be about looking at customer behavior, tying where they come from to the type of purchases they make, or even looking at consumption patterns.
Mining uses numerous mathematical and statistical techniques such as regression, clustering, etc. This means it’d be much easier, more efficient, and accurate to use tools that can execute these processes for you instead of doing it yourself.
If you’re a medium or large business, it would be impossible for you to carry out these tasks without tools because the sheer volume of data would be overwhelming to any person.
This is becoming an increasingly prevalent part of the analytics process. People have been more active on social media platforms than ever before, and usage is bound to increase with time. So, long texts, captions, tweets, etc., are mined mainly for sentiment analysis.
If a product is launched across all platforms or if a new feature has been introduced for customers, you can gather what people are saying about it in one place. You pick up both positive and negative words and understand the overall sentiment of your audience/customers.
Furthermore, customer support is a space where text is used a lot. In fact, it would be a direct conversation your customers have with you. So mining that text for improving your service and customer experience can take you a long way to enhance your brand perception or even transform it.
Forecasting
As mentioned earlier, forecasting is the process of predicting customer behavior. We can leverage data to know what kind of consumer trends will be occurring in the next year. Besides this, forecasting is the culmination of understanding what events are associated with purchasing your products and which ones trigger them.
Data Visualization
This is like the final step of analytics, where all the relevant information and insights you’ve derived through the above processes can be seen in one place in a visual format like graphs, charts, etc.
This gives you a holistic picture because looking at text and numbers can get overwhelming. So visualization essentially represents information in an easily understandable format and instantly gets your attention in places that need it.
This is merely an overview of how different facets of business analytics can help your business, and when you delve deeper, the number of processes, tasks, etc., becomes more complex. This is why you have platforms such as Decision Minds at your disposal. They offer numerous benefits to your organization, and some of the crucial advantages are listed below:
Benefits of Business Analytics Tools
You can connect all your platforms, websites, and essentially any touchpoint where the customer provides data to the tool, hence getting all the information and insights in one place. This saves an enormous amount of time, energy, and effort.
Your decision-making process is enhanced, which means your business decisions will be more accurate, and the success to failure ratio of any campaign increases by a significant margin.
It also becomes important when you set out to roll new products or features since you can predict the overall sentiment or reaction. Therefore, you once again increase your chances of success with these tools.
Conclusion
Business analytics is the future of customer targeting and marketing in general. This is because it provides too many factors and data points that give us a deeper understanding of the customers. We’ve never seen such tiny details and nuances of consumer behavior before because we haven’t had the tools to observe or measure them. With business analytics, that challenge is solved and can help you take your company/organization to new heights.
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