Data mining has a number of implications today, especially in the field of marketing. It not only concerns using complex statistical methods to gain insights about consumer behavior, but also relates to the more specific tasks of extracting various kinds of specialized information from online and offline resources.
While contemporary data mining involves identifying patterns within available data using statistical tools, traditional data mining involves extracting and compiling data, while also deriving insights from the same.
In this article, let us take a look at how data mining helps you understand your customers, which in turn helps with marketing initiatives.
To understand your customers, it is important to understand whom they patronize.
This is why, investing in data mining techniques such as competitor analysis is doubly important.
This helps you to understand who your competitors are, what their pricing and branding strategies are, how they present their information on their websites, and what kind of products and services they sell to your target audience.
With this knowledge in your armory, it is easy to take on your rivals, develop excellent marketing campaigns, while also wooing their regular customers.
A lot of useful and important information already exists on websites and other online resources. Data scraping helps extract important data based on certain criteria and save them to excel sheets or other easily accessible formats.
Data scraping helps you save man-hours expended in researching information required to develop excellent marketing campaigns. Information can range for customer insights to product details, and so on.
It is always easier to contact potential prospects and ensure they convert to leads if you have basic information about them. This includes their email, company information, their social profiles such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, etc.
Such information can be stored in databases based on a number of parameters, so that you can retrieve the information as and when you want, depending on your requirements. Marketing databases are important to ensure that your marketing and sales campaigns are implemented successfully.
You can learn a lot about consumers based on what they share on social networking sites, forums, certain members-only groups, message boards, and niche networking communities.
Data mining helps you to build databases filled with all this valuable information so that you can use them for your marketing activities. Social media data about your target audience helps you to tweak your products, develop better marketing campaigns, and ensure that your products and services are relevant to the target audience.
All the data you need may not be available online. This is why, it is important to look for offline resources such as published journals and books, subject matter experts, public relations agencies, etc.
Offline data can neatly be converted into information that can be accessed over spreadsheets online or over the cloud, always available for whatever purpose you may need it for.
While it is difficult to find the information one wants, it is also cumbersome to organize collected data.
Creating taxonomies and categories helps to assign importance and priority to collected information and data. These taxonomies are useful during the development of marketing campaigns.
It is interesting to note that many categories and classifications overlap, though they are not mutually exclusive. Data warehousing and data mining are never complete without creating appropriate taxonomies and categories.
Data extraction and data classification are important data mining techniques. However, deriving insights based on the collected information, and predicting outcomes using statistical tools are very important too.
These insights help in understanding consumer behavior, and how people purchase on online stores, helping you to design and develop better campaigns.
Insights derived from data mining can help companies to change every aspect of marketing and sales forecasting. Insights also help in building better relationships with your customers and thereby, nurture them even before they make purchases online.
This is possible thanks to a variety of data sources such as social media, forums, offline resources, etc. which we discussed above.
Data mining helps businesses to engage in successful marketing and sales initiatives by presenting required information and data in a timely manner. Be it categorizing data and information or making sense of existing data, data mining techniques have proven to help businesses to target even the most elusive market segments.
Most importantly, engaging in competitor analysis, deriving insights, creating different databases, and ensuring everything is easily accessible on demand helps you scale newer heights.
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