Data Monetization

“Data is power.  It differentiates and becomes the basis for new products, sales and customer relationships.   A company’s ‘optimal exploitation of data’ is key, but more importantly, that exploitation drives revenue.”

Josh Siegel

By collecting and analyzing a vast amount of customer data companies can better understand their customers’ needs and offer products and services to satisfy those needs profitably. It is important for the marketing department to coordinate with the information technology department to ensure a sufficient amount of data is being captured and utilized in the most efficient manner. By working together, the two departments can adjust their techniques as they learn about customers changing behaviors towards a certain product or service.

Some examples in which businesses can monetize their data include:

·      Grocery stores can offer customer loyalty cards that incentivize customers to shop with their cards. By collecting data through the use of the loyalty card, companies gain insights about customers buying patterns (such as what they are buying and where) and preferences and can use that information to smartly send relevant offers with a higher degree likely success.  Also, by monitoring customer buying patterns, grocery store management can send personalized offers of correlated products to their clients and adjust inventory based on their data.  

·      Companies in the hospitality industry own enormous amount of data about their customers (from collecting information they acquire when customers book hotel rooms or through other customer serves) and use that data to improve their client’s satisfaction rates and gain customer loyalty. For example, by utilizing analytics tools and performing sentiment analysis, hotels gain insights about customer reviews concerning their hotel on a variety of social media channels and learn about their clientele’s level of satisfaction from staying at their hotels or from using their services. After analyzing customer reviews and understanding what customers like and dislike, they can build recommendation systems or run targeted marketing campaigns to improve their customer satisfaction rates. Also, by having insights about customers booking history, hotels can create personalized offers for their clientele. For example, by collecting information from room service orders, hotels can adjust restaurant menus, learn about client’s allergies and provide an outstanding level of personalization.  

·      Transportation industries are also using data to leverage their business performance. Uber is a great example in which utilizing customer data changed the way an established industry operates now. Their branded app enables customers to order a car and allows them to receive important information such as estimated arrival time, travel duration and total cost of the ride. This unique information and data-driven service resulted in Uber gaining an enormous amount of customers. By effectively using data, Uber can determine where to situate their cars to minimize customer pick up times and maximize driver profitability. They also analyze their data to determine what complimentary businesses they could enter into such as food and package delivery services. By tracking driver’s locations at all times, the company provides a higher level of perceived security to their customers. When receiving complaints concerning unsatisfied rides, the company can check the data about that ride and monitor their driver’s performance- such as route and speed to make decisions about how to solve the problem in order to improve customer service, gain customer trust and loyalty- all in order to gain a larger market share and leverage their business.  

There are different ways in which companies can acquire data about their current or potential customers, some of them are: collecting information about customers and their reviews through social media channels, acquiring information through company transactions, conducting customer surveys and many more.  There is tremendous potential for companies that know their goals and know how to collect, analyze and utilize the data. Data can bring big value to a company, help to make better business decisions and leverage business performance.