Getting Value from Customer Analytics: What Every Leader Needs to Know
According to McKinsey, organizations that leverage the behavioral insights that their data reveals about customers outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and over 25 percent in gross margin. Most companies seem to be aware of this advantage: spending on marketing analytics is forecasted to increase 198 percent in three years. But although they are collecting reams of data about their customers, few companies are turning that data into actionable, value-adding strategies. Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Analytics Survey found that even companies with sizeable marketing analytics teams still aren’t getting what they could from their data. Marketing analysts, according to the survey, spend most of their time on data wrangling.
The good news is you don’t necessarily need technical expertise to benefit from customer analytics. To get the most from customer analytics, business leaders need to understand it from a big-picture perspective (the answer to the “so what”) rather than turning over the entire analytics operations to a siloed or outsourced team. The four action steps detailed below can help you guide your analytics team to turn data-driven results into actionable insights for your team.