Insights-as-a-Service — Winning in your market
In the world where FAANG are scaling their business influence with their ability to leverage data to grow their business. How can companies learn from them to consolidate and make their business more relevant with their customers with the ever-changing landscape and the fast pace of the transformation?
Every company is in a different stage of maturity and development.
They could be in the startup stage, where gaining market share is vital at the expense of profit. The startup period is where businesses stretch their imagination with pitches to convince their investors with ideas and aspirations. The founders will need to deliver services and experiences that will convince customers to move from competing services or try out novelty services that your startup offers, which could be life-changing and improve your daily life.
Generally, most businesses will reach a stage where they are at a phase to gain market recognition, draw steady revenue with new unique subscribers and regularly use the service. There is a need to start looking for profitability and scale. It is not possible to decouple both. The need to scale is to sign up more customers, reach out to more segments in the market and increase their Monthly Active Users. Their increase in scale will create an economy of scale, and the company can reach a tipping point where they begin to turn profitability.
For a business to make decisions in every department, the access to data and insights is very important. Data can help to answers some of the questions that will drive revenue:
- Who are we targeting in the market?
- What is the segment that the product will appeal to?
- What is our marketshare target and growth trajectory?
- What is relevant to the consumers currently?
- How are we going to link our sales target to the sales projection?
Keeping every stakeholder updated and involved to date, you will need to provide relevant insights at a different level. It can be challenging at times. You will need to address even stakeholders outside the enterprise walls.
An Example: Using Google Search trends to understand your customers and your operating geographic and how they might react to your products and services
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different questions over time. With this information, it provides businesses signals about what is happening through internet searches and queries, and it provides them with information on how they should tailor their marketing campaign so that it can reach more people at the location where they want it to be. Hence the product management team will also use these trends to decide what is new features they could start to look at, which geographic regions.
For launching any new features or products, businesses will need to evaluate the corresponding Total Addressable Market of the targeted region. The sizing activities determine whether the investment size necessary to deliver the features will be feasible with the estimated return of investment justified and how long it will take. Especially understanding the segment you are targeting will determine the price your consumers will be willing to pay and target total potential customers. All this requires stakeholders contribute their knowledge and understanding of the market collective to build up the business plans.
Focus on driving awareness and revenue; many businesses depend on marketing to reach out. Targeted marketing helps to drive better return on investment, converse cash. Spray marketing burns cash businesses will be unable to track their investment performance. High-quality business data drives efficient marketing; data is critical for driving, having good data about trends is essential.
Based on a Gartner survey, 35% of Digital Marketing Leaders Believe the Biggest Challenges in 2021 Come from Within Their Organization. Reducing silos between IT and marketing leadership is vital to drive the effectiveness of digital marketing activities. The barrier between stakeholders generally hovers around the lack of understanding and alignment of KPIs and OKRs. To eliminate the obstacle, departments can provide transparency and access to insights and performance metrics. The ability to use data and create insights is essential, as performance measurements in one department will not be the true reflection of the others. Usually, if required, enrichment with data from within the department reflects how a department will report and measure itself as part of the entire organization. At the same time, merging and enriching data allows your peers to understand the common denominator between each other, eventually aligning goals between departments easily.
Insights as a service and culture for the organization require everyone to participate. Governance and culture are needed to ensure data is appropriately shared, respecting data privacy. Today the risk of misusing information is getting higher with a significant impact on consumers confidence and regulator mandate.
As the needs for Insights of different individual decision-makers are very different, the following conditions must be available for an effective data-driven organization and leveraging on Insights-as-a-Service effectively:
- Data Stewards are the data custodians who define the governance and usage model.
- A Center of Excellence (CoE) for data will evaluate consistent business rules and enterprise risk. They will also be helping to drive data using good practices.
- The Data Governance model needs to be adhered to by all departments.
- Developing a standard Data Dictionary where all departments adhere to and self-service platform for businesses, even non-IT folks, to build their dashboard.
- An internal data marketplace based on role-based access provides easy access to data that you can access to
- Most importantly, all data are aggregated on the same platform, allowing common access and control.
With digitalization, data collection will grow exponentially. Hence the choice of platform and discipline is essential right from the start.
Are you ready for the data revolution to use and develop your own insights?
