Marketing in the modern and digital world has moved away from blind advertising to a game of strategy. It has now been dominated by concepts like data, analytics, insights, and the likes. This is to prove that brands that wish to ride with the trend have to step up and join in the art of knowing your customers.
Importance of understanding your customers
For the sake of this discussion, we focus on two types of brands. There are those that advertise and there are those that market. The brands that simply advertise are those who try to sell without paying attention or placing importance on the customers themselves. Well, that doesn’t work anymore.
If you appear to your audience in a desperate and unappealing manner, you would find it difficult to win their hearts. This is why it is very essential that you make efforts to understand your customers and their interests as well as their behavior.
You can only serve your customers to their satisfaction when you study them and understand them. For example, let’s assume the engagement on your social media page has been on the decline because your audience comprises majorly of people who are not interested in the contents you post.
A brand that pays no attention to its customers will be ignorant of the situation and will have zero clue on what to do. On the other hand, if you care about your customers enough to study their interests, behavior, and demography, you would be aware of the fact that the kind of content you post is different from what appeals to them. Hence, you can easily adjust to their taste. This is one of the importance of knowing your customers.
As a brand, it is equally important to understand your customers as it helps you offer excellent service to them and build a strong relationship with them. Building a bond between you and your customers urges them to advocate for your brand through word of mouth.
The best form of marketing you can get is a satisfied customer. This is because customers trust the words of their fellow customers even more than your brand that wants to sell. Hence, a satisfied customer is more of an asset to you. How do you satisfy a person whose interest you don’t know or understand?
Nevertheless, understanding your customers does not just happen. It requires active efforts of studying and analyzing your customers’ behavior. The only way you can do this is with the use of data. The process requires a thoughtful analysis of data on your customers to understand their patterns and interests.
Data Science
When it comes to thoroughly studying and analyzing data, data science is an inevitable concept for your brand. Data analysis covers every aspect involved in the use of data and this is why every brand needs to tap into this field to optimize its customer data.
Data science is a field that makes use of scientific methods, algorithms, processes, and systems for the extraction of knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data. It forms the connection between statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. All these are in a bid to systematically analyze and understand data. Data science involves methods and theories derived from other fields in mathematics, computer science, information science, and statistics.
Having big data is almost useless without turning them all into actionable insights. Analytics helps a business put all its customer data into good use and also allows you to understand your customers.
Using data to understand your customers and optimize your business
As a business, your customers should be of utmost importance to you. So much so that you make active efforts to let them know that you care about them and you see them as that. The fact remains that the success of your business relies mainly on your customers and so why not try so hard to retain them.
The process of customer retention begins with understanding your customers. The major purpose of understanding your customers is so you can appeal to them through your content, campaigns, and ads. The process of understanding your customers begins by analyzing data on their behavior and interests concerning your brand.
It is imperative that you understand your customers because it allows you to serve content tailored to their interests. Tailoring your content to your customers increases response and engagement on their end. This is because your content would resonate with them and stir up their instincts to respond positively.
One of the ways through which analytics contributes to understanding your customer is the process of creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. This representation gives you an insight into knowing the kind of demographic your customers comprise of. A buyer persona is created from research, and the available data you have gathered in your database concerning your customers. The process involves some level of data analysis because you have to collect data, analyze and understand it to triangulate and map out a persona of your customers.
Buyer personas are important tools in optimizing your business because they give you an insight on your customer and so you know the average details of your customers. it gives you details like age group, jobs, income level and other crucial information on your audience. This makes it easier to tailor content and marketing campaigns to them.
Another way through which data science helps you understand your customers and optimize your business is through audience segmentation. Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your audience based on criteria like location, age group, gender, and so on. The major purpose of this is to find a common interest or behavior within each sub-group.
Having insights on the common interests and behavior of your segmented audience allows you to create content personalized to them. This optimizes your business since framing personalized market campaigns to a particular sub-group increases their response to it. For example, if a particular portion of your audience in the same age group has shown interest in hoodies, you can target them with discounts on hoodies. Doing this would be way more productive than simply targeting your general audience.
Data analysis makes this possible because the process of audience segmentation involves capturing data, processing it, and analyzing it. Therefore, the concept of data science cannot be divorced from audience segmentation.
Data science also helps you explore your customer data and examine trends in customer behavior and interests. The process goes as far as deriving actionable insights from such data with which you can prescribe certain actions to help retain your customers and improve profitability.
With the presence of data analytics, businesses don’t need to take high risks but can now effortlessly undergo the process of gathering and analyzing data from various channels. You can create marketing models with existing data and simulate actions to determine the best strategies for your brand. Without introducing data science, all you will have is a bunch of numbers you know nothing about.
Another importance data science serves is to pick up existing data that is useless on its own and whip up useful insights from it. These insights generated through the process of data analysis would be relevant to your business to learn more about your customers and audience. Through this analysis of different sources of data, you can fashion your products to meet the interests and specifications of your audience, leading to increased profitability.
You can harness data analytics to explore the market history and compare your business to your competitors. It also helps you to analyze the market and make necessary recommendations concerning the place and time your products perform best. Data science provides you with an in-depth understanding of the market you operate and its response to your product. You can understand how your strategy works on your target audience.
For your brand, the process of recruiting new talents can prove to be cumbersome and exhausting. This is because you might have to read through possibly a thousand resumes, which doesn’t sound like an easy task. Well, all that doesn’t have to be anymore, thanks to HR analytics. It makes the recruiting process faster and easier because of the amount of data available on social media, job sites, and even corporate databases.
A data scientist could easily make use of the available data to find the best fit for your business. By conducting data processing for the resumes and entries, you would end up with a candidate that is a perfect fit and not just looks good on paper. This is another way through which data science helps you understand your customers and optimize your business.
Data science is very relevant to prevent you from getting lost in the huge supply of data available everywhere. Great quantities of data are created every minute and some of these are useful for your business. collecting data on your customers to study and understand them is highly important.
However, it could prove difficult because scouring through social media, website visits, and emails could be really tasking without a precise and targeted process. This precise process is data science. With it, you can easily and seamlessly analyze the data necessary for you to understand your customers.
Through this, you can process the customer data you have gotten and generate actionable insights to help you target your audience efficiently. By doing this, you can fashion content, products or campaigns to appeal to the interest and specifications of your potential customers, hence optimizing your business.
For example, if you own an e-commerce business, data science would be important for you to read your customers’ digital footprints on the web. This is essential because, with the data you gather on your customers, you can easily target them at the appropriate time.
If you have noticed that your female audience residing in a particular area has shown interest in wool hats, a good marketing strategy is to target them with discounts and new stocks on wool hats. Without data analysis, it would be difficult to read meanings to this data and know what it says.
For these reasons, innovations in marketing like data science and artificial intelligence cannot be overlooked if you want to compete with top brands in your niche. This is because their presence has brought easier and painless methods for you to run marketing campaigns for your business.
For any who is willing, data science can add value to brands by eliminating limits to data analysis. Data is a very crucial part of marketing as, without data, a brand would only operate blindly. The sooner you recognize the role data plays in marketing, the faster you would benefit from it. Data science has come to provide value for you by helping you understand your customers and optimizing your business.
If you want to understand your customers and optimize your business – just contact us. We will get in touch with you immediately.