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If you are a sales and marketing executive or an operations head, you may be familiar with the term ‘Data is the new oil’. Simply because it is fueling much of a business’ success, this phrase may actually hold. The more data you have the better insights you will derive.
But what happens when your boss is adamant about terming web data extraction a fruitless activity? How do you make a compelling case for the invaluable ways in which web data can take the business to the next level of growth?
Believe me, there are still quite many stubborn bosses who simply do not want to see the phenomenal competitive difference data brings to a company. In addition to education and prompting from time to time, you would need a few tips to help make a compelling case for the impact and efficacy of acquiring web data for better decision making and generating actionable insights.
1. Better personification for targeting
What is the number one reason for customer attrition and lower conversion? Yes, you got it right. You aren’t as effective at engaging with customers as needed. To boost the customer engagement rate, you need data. Data will help you figure out what are the relevant pain points the customers face, and how your product can help address these issues.
Data lets you target customers better. Imagine selling life insurance policies hard to teenagers. That is the mismatch between your target customers and your product USP that data seeks to resolve. The efficacy of advertising works better when you have targeted your ads for the right audience. And this will happen only when data tells you more about their preference, their needs, and their concerns. This way you can refine your marketing campaign to these vital pieces of information.
When you align the product with the right set of customers, you are sure to get more bang for every advertising dollar you spend on the outreach of the product and the brand. Web data sources that can aid you in better targeting include blogs, forums, social media portals, and other online communities.
2. Change data assets to profit center
For many businesses, data infrastructure and assets are a cost center. When you pitch to your boss, you need to show how these assets can be converted to a profit center instead. And you have lots of use cases to make your point. Data has proven to improve every facet and function of a business.
By sharing data about products, leads, and existing accounts, you can devise ways to cross-sell, up-sell, and upgrade. With data, you can improve retention rates, avoid attrition, improve brand image, and enrich customer service.
3. Fueling innovation
Newer ways of collecting data (within ethical bounds of course) means that marketers get new insights that previously weren’t available to them. In today’s age of cut-throat competition, businesses demand innovation in data extraction to offer them the right path to focus on and give maximum value for every dollar spent through KRAs like social listening, comparative analysis, target marketing, and marketing analytics.
One important point here is that the collection and analysis of data cannot be at the cost of customer privacy or the need to know. Today’s customer is smart and doesn’t appreciate intrusive ways of collecting data. Web data being in the public domain is naturally immune to the data privacy issue.
With the right amount of data available to the right set of team members at the right time, you can better advertise your products to the intended audience.
4. Data scores one-up on opinions
Actionable and relevant data is the key enabler to smart decision making. For this, however, you need to first have data to analyze. Hence web data aggregation makes total sense from a strategy formulation point of view.
To put it in the right context-relevant data that is extracted from relevant sources is indisputable and removes ambiguity in decision making. When your boss contradicts this statement, he is forgetting that all his decisions too are taken with the help of data – be it performance appraisals, project performance reports, or sales forecasting, all are examples where he simply cannot take decisions without having access to numbers and figures.
5. Data improves efficiency
A major chunk of data that is collected by your organization at the moment will be internal i.e. about staff, employees, and clients. No doubt collecting and analyzing such data powers up the HR and operations function.
For example, if you use ERP, the application is doing nothing but collecting all the important data you need to make decisions about optimizing staff strength and boosting productivity as per your organizational objective.
So suppose, if your ERP says that Peter is not performing up to his potential (high absenteeism, low productivity, a high number of issues on projects), it is a cue that he cannot be promoted to the ranks of a team manager, as the data doesn’t support this decision. With this data, you can easily make the right decisions that will help the entire organization.
Imagine if you didn’t have this data and had gone ahead with promoting Peter. He would’ve continued messing up with team management, time management, and project management goals leading to huge losses in terms of disgruntled employees and unhappy customers. With data, you can avoid such costly mistakes and make better decisions.
Likewise, you can also make a strong point about web data since modern data collection techniques like web scraping can help you can quickly collect tonnes of data to be utilized for your various business intelligence use cases.
To conclude
With these tips, you would surely convince your boss to invest in collecting and analyzing web data using modern web data extraction techniques. After all, now you have the data (in the form of these points) to make a resounding case pitch in front of your boss for web data aggregation, analysis, and visualization.
