This is the second in our series of blogs about how you can use the information your business holds more effectively, helping you to retain the customers you have, find new customers and use your time and energy in the most efficient way. The first blog can be found here.
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The first blog touched on some of the information your business will hold and gave an example of how you might use it to spot trends in your customer base, helping you to gain a deeper understanding of how best to focus where you are targeting your business.
This is just one example and there are so many other ways that you can use the information you have. We’ll touch on a few of these in more detail here, but it’s worth noting that this is by no means a comprehensive list, and the information you hold, and the ways it might benefit you, will be very different for different businesses. The first example we’ll look at today is…
What’s popular
A relatively obvious one. Regardless of what your business does, you’ll have a range of different things that customers might want you to do. You likely already do some analysis of what products or services sell better than others (and if not, do that. Like now…), and this could simply be in your head rather than written down. But the fun thing about data is that there are loads and loads of different ways that it can be looked at.
So, let’s take the example of the previous blog and move it to another level. Looking at customer data from the previous year can help you understand the seasonal trends there might be for your services. However, doing the same exercise over a longer period can help you to see longer-term changes in the popularity of different products or services, that aren’t necessarily related to the time of year. Going deeper, you can even look at the demographic of the customer who is purchasing different products or services and identify what your target audience may be; this can help you market products to the right audience, giving you a better chance of success.
The same principle can work just as well for a start-up that has just begun trading. Regularly looking at trends in what you are selling can really help you to find the niche in the market you’ve entered, helping you to identify where you might want to target your business to establish a foothold.
Business to business services
The second example is specific to B2B companies. If you’re a business that offers services to other businesses, a really insightful piece of analysis can be on the types of businesses using your services. For some businesses, this will be really obvious, however most B2B companies have scope to work with a variety of businesses, within different markets.
To use ourselves as an example, we have helped businesses in areas ranging from wellbeing, logistics, hospitality and housing. Taking a deeper look at the sectors of the businesses you work with can be another vital source of information that can help you to appropriately target your time and effort to find new customers.
Taking this a step further, you could also think about the relationships your clients have with other businesses, and whether there is the potential to tap into this to expand your own customer base. If you have done a great job for your client, asking them to refer your business to others within their own network can be a great source of potential.
Birthdays
A final example for today is something slightly different – birthdays! If you collect a date of birth from your customers, you could think about doing a little birthday surprise – maybe a specific birthday offer, or discount.
You’ll want to think carefully about your messaging if you did this, as a generic marketing email targeting a person’s birthday might not be well received (I think we’ve all had those types of email – I know I put them straight into junk...).
You would also need to be mindful of the GDPR rules we linked to in the last blog. However, a well-done email could really help cement you as a business that cares about their customers.
As mentioned above, the data held and how it can best be used to grow a business will vary quite a bit. If you would like to have a chat about how best you could use the information you have to grow your business, drop us a line at contact@mckeownscullin.com.
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