Understand your data, exploit your knowledge
Data mining is the process of analysing your customer and industry data from different perspectives and summarising it into useful segments – to increase revenue, cut costs, or both.
Data, information, and knowledge
Data
Data includes any facts, numbers, or text that can be processed by a computer. Today, businesses are accumulating huge and growing amounts of data in different formats and in most cases, in different databases. This includes:
- Operational or transactional data such as, sales, cost, inventory, payroll, and accounting.
- Non-operational data, such as industry sales, forecast data, and macro-economic data.
- Meta data – data about the data itself, such as logical database design.
Information
Patterns, associations, or relationships in all the data that can provide information. An example would be – analysis of retail point of sale (POS) transactional data can demonstrate information on which products are selling and when.
Knowledge
Information can be converted into knowledge – about historical patterns and future trends. It can provide knowledge of consumer buying behaviour, useful for both manufacturers and retailers for promotional efforts.
Benefits of data mining?
Data mining is primarily used by companies with a strong consumer focus – retail, financial, communication, and marketing businesses. It allows these companies to determine relationships for “internal” factors such as price, product positioning, or training, and “external” factors such as economic indicators, competition, and customer demographics.
Businesses can benefit in a number of ways from data mining, including:
Increase cashflow
Money is vital in business. When data is mined that exposes the projects that worked, and types of productscustomers have purchased in the past. Once a business knows who their top customers are, and what they want; they can personalise the approach and outreach.
Improve branding and marketing
Data can reveal a number of things – a godsend for marketing departments. Marketing can then personalise the promotions, develop appropriate products and promotions, and therefore improve the branding and overall marketing of the company.
Integrated marketing
It is vital to understand how customers want to be approached and to talk to them in an integrated manner. Data that includes contact details as well as demographic information is highly valuable. It also saves money, whether it’s in postage or time, by ensuring the recency of your consumer information.
Tap into New Markets
It is possible to extend into new markets by purchasing databases, or using publicly available databases. This is great, but it should be treated with caution. Privacy is a big legal issue, and you have not got the explicit permission of the customer to contact them – yet.
Share information
Sharing information is largely illegal, but if customers approve it, it is allowed. Also, for the B2B market, rules are not quite as tight. Be wary of data collected for another purpose – even if you collected it yourself for another project.
Learn
Data mining of past information and comparing it to the current situation can reveal a lot. Analysing seasonality, for example, can give a business insight that otherwise might be overlooked.
Why not contact Jack Marketing Solutions™ today to maximise your data mining impact – call us today on +44(0)203 397 3557.
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