Understanding Your Market and Your Customers
Most companies have at least some basic customer information available to them, for example customer names, addresses and contact information; and a transactional history.
For those who do not, Datamine can assist with setting up a process to collect and store customer information, as well as providing options for getting started with some basic analytics in the meantime.
For those who do, and who want to use this information to help plan, develop and implement their marketing strategies, we are often asked 'Where do we start?'.
Data-driven marketing starts with using the knowledge contained within your own data to gain a clearer understanding of your customers, business and markets.
For this reason, a knowledge discovery, or exploratory data analysis can be the ideal place to start your data-driven marketing journey. It will more often than not provide the answers to some previously unanswered questions, debunk some assumptions and provide the means to plan your next course of action.
The main aim of a knowledge discovery is to give a better overall understanding of your customer base, using profiling techniques and trend/pattern analysis. The exact content will depend on each client's individual requirements, but it will typically include:
- Key customer base statistics, including acquisition and churn trends
- Behavioural analysis, including basic RFM (recency/frequency/monetary value)
- Product usage patterns
- Demographic profiling, using Census data
- Geographic penetration
This sort of analysis is invaluable for initial identification of key customer groups for targeting purposes, highlighting missed opportunities and spotlighting concerning trends. It is also inevitably invaluable for prioritising specific areas requiring further exploration - such as acquisition, potential value or churn analyses.
One of the major obstacles for companies wanting to understand more about their customers is accessing and cleaning the data so it can be analysed. Datamine has extensive experience extracting data from some of New Zealand's largest companies and has developed ways to merge disparate databases from different systems to provide a 'single customer view'.
Profiling is another tool used to give marketers a clear picture of their customers. It is usually tailored to meet specific requirements, such as identifying the types of customers who use particular products or who demonstrate specific behaviours. For example, by understanding the profile of customers who currently use a particular product range, it will be much easier for you to devise an acquisition strategy for a new product within that range. Datamine’s profiling service is often employed in conjunction with other services we offer.
Markets are made up of many types of customers, therefore marketers need to understand which segments offer the biggest opportunities. Segmentation is a tool used to collate customers into manageable groups based on demographic likeness and behavioural similarities. Marketing strategies can then be adapted to reflect the differing needs of a particular segment.
The latest development in Datamine's aim to assist businesses in understanding their customers and markets is a joint initiative with Westpac called 'Business Insight'. This places a company's knowledge about their own company within the context of their overall competitive marketplace. It does by accessing and analysing a wider set of customer and transactional data. The Business Insight service is invaluable in helping businesses increase their customer, business and market knowledge and there is a range of analytical options available.
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