In today’s data-driven world, the effective use of corporate data isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a strategic move.
But what’s all the fuss about? Well, a well-structured data strategy can be a powerful catalyst for business growth, enabling organisations to make informed decisions, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately, gain an edge over competitors.
In 2024, if you want to get ahead, you need to utilise your data. In fact, research has shown that businesses that use data-driven strategies drive five to eight times as much ROI as businesses that don’t.
It’s no wonder, then, that becoming data-driven is top of the agenda for forward-thinking organisations today.
With that in mind, read on to find out more about how to harness the potential of your corporate data and how to utilise it to fuel your business growth…
5 steps to utilise corporate data strategy to grow your business
1. Align your strategy with your business objectives
To kick things off, if you’re going to use your data to drive business growth, you first need to align your data strategy with your overarching business goals.
Start by looking at where your business is now and comparing it to where you want to be in the future to identify how you’re going to get there. What are the objectives that matter most to your organisation? How about your current business successes and challenges? And what would you like to achieve in the future?
Whether your overall aim is to increase revenue, expand market share, or improve customer satisfaction, your data needs to be the driving force behind these initiatives. As such, it’s essential to get a clear picture of the gaps in your current strategy, identify the changes you need to make to fill them, and determine how your data can get you to where you want to be.
2. Make sure you can count on your data
Next up, if you are going to use your data to grow your business, you need to make sure you can count on it. Be completely honest with yourself: do you really trust your data? 34% of Chief Marketing Officers don’t, and this rises to 50% of CTOs.
But if you’re going to use your data to grow your business, that needs to change. Great data is constructed from regularly cleansed, well-managed first-party data sources and enriched with third-party insights – so if your data is going to become the foundation on which you grow your organisation, and if you’re going to use it to inform business-critical decisions, you need to make sure it’s accurate and of a consistent quality.
By generating a data audit, you can bring all your data together for a single data view to understand the state of your data, ensure your data is clean, enhance it, and then apply it. Once your data has been audited, you should also regularly cleanse it too, so that you can ensure your database remains current and accurate.
3. Use data to inform your decisions
So, you have a single data view of clean, accurate, high-quality data. Now what? Well, the goal of a corporate data strategy is to use that data to enable you to solve problems, surface trends, and make informed decisions that streamline your path to value.
Through profiling and segmentation, predictive models, and data analysis, you can use your data to access brand-changing insights and get closer to your customers. As a result, you can track their behaviour, uncover trends, and predict exactly what your customers want even before they do.
What’s more, by using these insights to inform your business strategies and target your marketing, you can ensure your decisions are rooted in evidence rather than guesswork.
4. Use data to enhance the customer experience
What this all comes down to is customer experience. In today’s hyper-personalised world, customer experience is more important than ever before. 66% of customers expect companies to understand their individual needs, which means that in 2024, your customers don’t just want to feel special – they demand it.
If you’re going to grow your business, deepen customer relationships, and improve the customer journey, you need to deliver exceptional experiences. That begins with utilising your data to segment your customers and break down criteria so you can prioritise the key outcomes required to shift towards growth.
You probably have thousands of customers on your CRM, but if you don’t segment them properly, you won’t be able to deliver an experience that delights them. By using your data to uncover how each customer journey works, you can start to connect with them in a more holistic way. Then, you can use your data to define the objectives and set KPIs.
Did you know that marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue? That’s powerful stuff, which is why it’s so important to use your data to understand your customers, make more cost-effective marketing decisions, and deliver seamless, exceptional, omnichannel experiences.
5. Monitor and improve over time
Finally, if you’re going to ensure your corporate data strategy continues to drive growth, it’s essential to monitor its effectiveness and make any necessary changes.
Regularly reviewing KPIs and measuring key analytics such as contactability, channel agnostics, engagement and conversion rates, and business impact enables you to gauge the success of your corporate data strategy so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
Essentially, by using empirical evidence and developing projections and predictions, you can measure what works and make any necessary adjustments so you can keep improving your customer journeys, plan for the future, and deliver long-term wins.
How we can help you use data to achieve business growth
In summary, corporate data strategy isn’t just another industry buzzword (although we know there are a lot of them). Rather, it’s a critical tool for business growth that enables you to make informed decisions, deliver enhanced customer experiences, and unlock your business’s true potential.
If you’d like to find out more about how utilising corporate data strategy can help to grow your business, you’ve come to the right place. At Edit, we are driven by strategy, informed by data, and enabled by technology.
When you work with Edit, we’ll bring together data auditing and cleansing, customer data platform implementation, data science, digital analytics and more to support you on your journey to business growth.
Ready to utilise your data to unlock your potential? Simply contact us today to learn more about our data-driven solutions.
