It’s All About Analytics
They say ignorance is bliss, but information, most of the time, proves to be a game changer and a revenue maker.
Insight can help you take advantage of a great opportunity or warn you to stay away from a huge mistake. But how much effort do we put into our understanding?
Do you know which products sell well? Probably, because this information is fairly standard and easy to get. You know what’s selling well and what isn’t. But do you know what is selling well to whom? And do you know why?
Analytics can tell us so much more than what is selling well and what isn’t. Who is buying the things that are selling well? Do your products generally appeal to individuals of a certain age, income level, geographic location, behavior disposition? Which products sell well to your 18 to 25 age group? Which sell well to your 65 + crowd?
There are many tools available to help you learn more about your members or customers. CRM, MCIF and other marketing database tools consolidate and aggregate your data, so you can more easily analyze it. They often also come with pre-built segmentations that can provide additional value. For the truly adventurous, there are tools like SPSS, SAS, and SQL Server Analysis Services that provide the ability to dig deeper—and sometimes even to analyze blindly in order to find patterns that you might not even suspect are there.
But when you’ve done all of this analysis, which takes much more time and effort than any of us want to, we aren’t done yet. We now know what sells well to whom, and which attributes might be good predictors of future purchasing decisions, but we still don’t always know why. Sure, we will invariably form theories, but we’re missing an opportunity if we don’t put those theories to the test.
Two additional tools in the arsenal of the information and insight driven marketer are marketing and sales tests, where you formulate hypothesis, create a marketing plan around that, and then see if the results validate the hypothesis (I know, it sounds so scientific, but it can actually be fun!). Also, surveys can be used to seek validation on key assumptions—though you must keep in mind that some questions will fail to yield good results, because people aren’t always consciously aware of their patterns of behavior and their motivations. But a good marketer can play detective (again, here is more fun to be had).
Doing these things will set you apart from the pack, precisely because they require time, effort, and money. But the marketer that is willing to invest in these steps will find that the rewards for their company (and their career) are well worth it!
