3 Key Steps to Build A Successful Business Database
The proliferation of available data in the digital age from multiple channels (e.g. daily travel, online shopping, website and social networks) has redefined the boundaries of customer knowledge and offers great potentials for digital marketing. The biggest challenge of all these data sources, in fact, is how to standardize all these diverse and unqualified data in a single database.
Here are some key steps to help companies to achieve their business goals with data!
1.Understand the structure
Big data, small data, smart data … Speaking of the data, the specialists do not lack imagination. But behind all these many buzzwords lies a reality – the quality of the data and its importance to the business.
To exploit the increasingly large and complex data, we must understand the structure. Now we have a lot of new unstructured data from emails and social media, and these data keep growing very quickly and very large volumes. Faced with this exponential growth, recovery of data (structured and unstructured) has become a strategic issue for many companies. Therefore, whatever the origin of the data, it is necessary to make an important work of structuring, data organization and homogenization. This first purely technical step should not be neglected because of it depends on all the actions that will be implemented later. For example, we can focus on three major types of data:
- First-party data – they correspond to the data collected directly by a company.
- Second-party data – they are nature, but from other actors who share with you (e.g., partnerships with other sites, interactions on social networks).
- Third-party data – these data purchased by the brand enrich its knowledge (audience segments, open data, demographics).
2.Break data silos
This consolidation work obviously involves close collaboration between marketers and other business services. Breaking data silos means making the marketing, data and technology work together to maximum efficiency for customer marketing. This is the way that the data actually work for business.
From the data point of view, breaking the silos also means linking the different existing databases in the business to avoid loss of information and have a tool offering the most complete and consistent vision for customer services. Thus, the reported data can incorporate the behaviour data, tracking data and sales data, and to process and analyze data from these sources all together to enrich the customer knowledge and provide customized relationship and consistency.
3.Enrich data by real-time updates
If building a single database provides a comprehensive and detailed knowledge of each customer, it must adapt and enrich this knowledge constantly with data updated in real-time. Updating data is frequently or in real-time is important. You should take some actions before you realize that your database has become obsolete and the outdated data has reduced the performance of the marketing strategies and profits.
Also, ongoing analysis of data during the deployment of campaigns marketing would allow a company to collect valuable data, and to adjust and constantly enrich its contact database.
