Data, data everywhere

Digital data is the new due diligence of business planning. A recent Accenture report found that 60 percent of leading growth companies said that they extract and translate customer and market data into strategic insight.

So how do businesses unlock this growth opportunity? There are a number of trends and different data-led strategies that can be effective:

• Search data - both external and on-site - can help inform businesses on what the universal demand is for products and services, which businesses are stealing market share, which content is most attractive to customers, among other insights
  
• Analytics data tells businesses why people aren't buying their products, which products are more/less appealing, what customers' average order value is, etc
  
• Social data tells customer service teams how to pinpoint customer complaints - and indeed gives them a real-time response channel, where untapped communities, tribes or potential customers can be found, what the media is saying about the business and how this is impacting on share price.

So why isn't every business tapping into the digital goldmine? Collecting the data is the easy part, but there are also some pitfalls:

• Data gets siloed within marketing and left to the devices of the online, direct marketing or CRM teams
  
• Businesses are gathering so much unfiltered data that they find themselves drowning in it. They can't extract the useful information from the pointless
  
• There is a huge analytics skills gap. And data interrogation skills are lacking - few planners challenge data in a real-world context and too many inexperienced online marketers take data at face value. Data in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing
  
• Data doesn't get filtered, formatted and interpreted into meaningful management information. It languishes in the world of clicks and ‘likes' and bounces. This means nothing to C-suites - and why should it?

If the first decade of the new Millennium was about gathering and digitising the world's information, the second will be about filtering and translating it into knowledge, insight and innovation that will bring brands closer to their customers and content providers closer to realising significant revenue growth. There's gold in them thar hills, so let's grab our shovels and get digging.

By Amanda Davie, managing director of digital consultancy Reform

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