5 Ways to Leverage Unstructured Data for Marketing Effectiveness

The value chain that you create for the customer would increase manifold if you combine the insights gathered from structured and unstructured data. This will help the marketers to be more targeted, creative, personalized and most importantly improve the conversion rate with a fulfillment of the marketing objectives more easily.

On an average, the Fortune 1000 companies increase their net income by $65 million by expanding the data accessibility by just 10%. Such is the power of data, and when it comes to unstructured data it is more like combining the structured, unstructured and the contextual data which helps marketers to make more smart and accurate decisions faster. Along with it, as customer service evolves to become more of a strategic tactic of enhancing customer experience there is more focus on building loyalty and brand advocacy.

Furthermore, the digital touchpoints have been more critical in evolving as vital components of customer relationships which endowed the marketers the onus of the customers’ journey and experience. Taking all these factors into consideration it is even more important and rather imperative to unlock the value of the unstructured data for the benefit of marketing and other business endeavors. Here are the ways to do it.

Determine the purpose

The most important aspect of putting data to use is to, first of all, determine the business and marketing objectives that you want to accomplish. This will determine the information you need and help you in figuring out the data that will fetch you that information. This will help you to come up with a plan to find the right technology to analyze such type of data from all the customer touchpoints and other contextual sources.

Improve accessibility by breaking silos

As data should be accessible, removing the data silos by leveraging technology and siphoning the cultural barriers is of utmost importance. Data is collected by different departments of an organization which normally cannot be accessed and pulled by all. Organizations must ensure that silos are broken to improve accessibility and data is stored at a common place so that analysts can access them when needed.

Formulate a plan

There should be an organization-wide awareness about data accessibility with a commitment from the top management to address issues like data ownership and compliance. A plan should be formulated with the involvement of all the business leaders which would address the current business and marketing challenges. The plan should answer the intended questions and should address the issues that need to be resolved.

Analyze the combined data

The structured, unstructured, and the contextual data should be combined and analyzed together which renders more actionable insights than just analyzing one data type alone. It should be ensured that unstructured data is collected, collated, and refined and is analyzed along with the structured data. The challenge in analyzing unstructured data is because of its volume. Organizations should deploy natural language processing and artificial intelligence to categorize, track, and analyze unstructured data automatically. The data analysts should combine the unstructured and the structured data for a more contextual understanding of the situations with more specific answers to the ‘whys’?

Measure and track ROI

Although tracking ROI of the analytics program may be challenging but it provides the key to render value to data analytics, and it helps in gaining support from the management. ROI can be measured by measuring the impact of the program and the decisions taken in terms of ROI versus what would be the impact without the analytics. There are other instances of increment of ROI also like the increase in customer satisfaction levels, reduction in labor turnover, etc. Once the attributes are arrived at, the savings from these can be calculated using set procedures.

Future lies in the power of data and the companies who would be able to take smarter decisions based on data and predictions will be ahead in the competition. For this to happen the companies need to evolve and unlock their potential in leveraging data and analytical power.

Key Takeaways

• The value chain that you create for the customer would increase manifold if you combine the insights gathered from structured and unstructured data.
• The structured, unstructured, and the contextual data should be combined and analyzed together which renders more actionable insights than just analyzing one data type alone.
• Future lies in the power of data and the companies who would be able to take smarter decisions based on data and predictions will be ahead in the competition.