Customer Engagement: Where Are The Data-Driven Insights?

As marketing channels continue to rapidly evolve, so too has the role of the chief marketing officer. So what does the future-centric CMO look like? According to a new SAP white paper titled “The DNA of a Growth CMO,” the key growth drivers of this future movement are customer engagement and data-driven insights. Never before have these traits been more important in Business-to-Business.

“Customer engagement: Reflected in the organization’s ability to understand the consumer – a first step towards engagement and marketing’s custody of the customer experience and the continuous value exchange between customers and the company.”

“Data-driven insights: The ability to extract insights from data and apply them to diverse marketing activities in support of business goals.”

Yet in the B-to-B world, data-driven insights are still proving to be a challenge. Often the challenge is the result of the siloed nature of companies where marketing and sales are in their own worlds and do not share data. So without insight, it is difficult to impact customer engagement in a meaningful way.

How Can Current Customers Help Marketers with Generating New Customers?

By understanding current customers and their degree of loyalty to a business, a company can begin to create profiles for good, better and best customer types. Ultimately, marketing can use the insights to target customers with a similar profile and set of needs.

Current Customer Data Is the Key to Better Insights

One of the challenges many B-to-B companies have is generating insights from data. The challenge is often little to no data to analyze. Even with marketing automation programs being used more and more as a way to collect useful data, the timeline to collect enough data to turn it into meaningful insights can be long.

One data resource that is typically untapped by marketing is current customer data. Much of this data is financial. While it may be a little messy to sort through it, this existing customer data can prove to be a way to define initial customer segments (good, better, best). Once the financial segmentation has been completed, qualitative research can flush out the segmentation profiles to gain more insight into how current customers rate a company’s day-to-day performance and how a company compares to its competitors.

In the end, this data-collection process gives a marketer insight into how customer needs vary by segment, gaps that exist in performance between the company and customer segments, and insight into how the company fares against competitors. These combined insights enable marketers to create actionable programs to retain customers as well as provide insights into how to communicate to potential best customers.

Learn more must-haves to B-to-B success. Register for the October 29 gyro/Loyalty Research Center webinar, “The Growth CMO: Real Customer Insights Driving Tangible Results,” to learn about a customer valuation model using customer intelligence data you may already have available to drive insights that can make lead generation and customer retention measurable.

Customer Engagement: Where Are The Data-Driven Insights?