Benefits and Challenges of using Customer Data for marketing.

Around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. As a company, you know how much data is important, and mostly the one about your customers.

When we talk about customer data, we mean about the information let by a customer while exploring a company’s website, application, social networks, …

They can be personal (recognize an identity), about the engagement (customers interactions), behavioural (patterns that customers let behind them) or attitudinal (perception by the customer of the brand and offerings).

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Collecting this kind of data represents benefits and challenges. 

Benefits

- Understand your market: by analyzing the data collected, it is possible to understand the way customers behave online and so on, to improve the consumer experience and satisfaction to create demand.

- Consumer database: IP addresses, email addresses and phone numbers collection from customers interactions with the brand. This allows companies to improve their lead generation strategy to have better quality leads.

- Marketing strategy: thanks to the data collected, it is easy to know what kind of campaigns work with the company’s target, deepen the buyers' persona profile. Thanks to that, the next campaign will be more effective and targeted.

- Personalisation: by collecting data, it is possible to personalise a campaign based on the customer profile. This will allow the company to meet customer expectations.

Challenges

- Data growth: store and analyze this information, which is more and more consequent. 

- Generating insights: obtain data is not enough for a company, they need to analyze its elements to achieve business goals. 

- Big data talent: to have data of quality, companies need to hire big data experts, which are more and more asking. As a consequence, we can observe an increase in salaries.

- Disparate data sources: the data comes from many different sources, such as social networks, applications, emails, ... Compiling them to exploit them is a challenge today.

- Validating data: because data is collected from different sources, the information can not correspond to one another.

- Securing big data: data has to be protected from hackers.

References:

Marr B., 2018. 'How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read', Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/#76c9fda860ba

Deshpande I., 2019. 'What Is Customer Data? Definition, Types, Collection, Validation and Analysis', martechadvisor.com. Available at: https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/data-management/customer-data-definition-types-collection-validation-analysis-martech101/

'The Importance of Data: The Top Benefits of Collecting Customer Data', insights.truyo.com. Available at: https://insights.truyo.com/consumer-data

Hall K., 2019. 'Customer Data Quality: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly', validity.com. Available at: https://www.validity.com/customer-data-quality/

Harvey C., 2017. 'Big Data Challenges', datamation.com. Available at: https://www.datamation.com/big-data/big-data-challenges.html