Marketing analytics: Know your customers

You know how much of your product/service you’re selling (hopefully), but do you understand how each customer fits into the mix? Businesses need to move from a product-centric model to a customer-centric model as changes in society and technology place more power in the customer’s hands. This week you will learn about the importance of valuing your customers – and how to uncover that value.

Once you understand the importance of customer value, you will want to get your hands on all the data you can about your customers, to help you decide how best to serve them. However, beware: Not all customer data is equal. This week you will learn about the importance of balance. - Balancing how easy it is to gather and analyse against its relevance to your business. +-Balancing the relevance/importance of data you could or should be gathering against the cost of obtaining that data. Finding the balance between relying on the types of data you’ve always used against the promises made about data obtained by digital means. Working out how to weigh up the relative usefulness and importance of disparate types of data.

Unless you’re working for a large multinational firm, it’s highly likely that the cost of gathering and analysing the optimal amount of relevant customer data is more than you can afford. However, there are many cloud-based, software as a service (SAAS) tools available that make robust analysis achievable. This week we will explore the types of tools used by both large and small businesses for customer data and analysis and identify which questions will help you determine which ones are most relevant to you.

Once you have decided which types of customer data are relevant, achievable and affordable, and then gathered all the information on customers that you can, how do you turn it into something useful (for both you and your customer)? This week we explore how to combine different forms of data to create a meaningful picture of your customers. Using the customer-centric frameworks developed earlier in this unit, we consider how to best understand your customers, what they want, and how you can re-tool your business to meet their needs.