MNI Blog  /  2 minute read

4 Simple Rules for Making the Most of Your Data

Learn how to make the most of your data with these 4 simple rules. Set clear goals, stay committed, understand your customers' journey, and create an integrated environment to support your goals. Drive your business forward with a solid data strategy.

Data of all kinds is essential to business-making decisions.  Data influences everything from B2B and B2C advertising campaigns to the way business is done in healthcare and politics.  Data is the information that fuels ideas, determines actions, and quantifies results. Yet, despite its importance, many data managers proceed with campaigns amid a mountain of ambiguity and conflicting goals.

In this era of relying increasingly on data for everything from making accurate revenue projections to delivering great customer experiences, a data strategy should be one of your first priorities, not one of your last. Do it right, and you can look forward to having access to precisely the data and insights required to drive your business forward. Neglect it, and you’ll be drowning in more data than you need before you know it, with not a clue how to make the most of it as a tool for business improvement.

It’s simple and not so simple at the same time.  To make data work for you, the first step is to determine what success looks like to your company. To accomplish this, you need to prioritize objectives, share them internally, and be committed to seeing them through.

How to Build a Data Strategy for Your Brand

• Set Clear Goals

Once you know where you want to go, it’s much easier to determine the KPIs to ensure you’re on the path
to success. Is the campaign goal awareness, site traffic, engagement, online sales, lead generation, or in-store traffic? In most situations, there will be more than one goal, and that means there will also be more than one KPI. Your agency partners should help you figure out if you’ve got them right and if you’re missing any.
This collaborative approach also ensures you’re on the same page, since you’ll be optimizing and monitoring these KPIs closely.

• Stay the Course

Once you’ve decided what your campaign goals are and how you’re going to measure them, the next important step is to STICK TO THEM. If you’re getting great engagement on your sales-focused campaign, don’t change your goal! Figure out what’s working and what isn’t and adjust so you’re maximizing sales.

• Understand Your Customers Journey

The best way to gain insight into prospects is to use data intelligence to formulate a strategic, integrated, multichannel campaign at each stage of the customer life cycle.  The goal here is to create actionable customer interaction profiles to target and drive pertinent messaging offers, and have these tailored to push them through the right channel.

• Create the Integrated Environment that Supports Goals

Multichannel marketing campaigns optimize revenue performance at the right time with the right offer
to the right customer.

There’s no magic wand that’ll make sure your communication campaign is on track, but using data smartly and judiciously is always an excellent start.