How to Monetize Data

As discussed in the previous article, data may be a company’s valuable and precious asset. However, not every company is maximizing its economic benefit. It is important to figure out how to derive a profit from the data which can also help distinguish your company in the marketplace. InformationWeek talks about several ways to monetize data. Let’s look at five of those ways and see how people who want to monetize data should do for their business.

Help Decision Making and Strategy Planning

Management is responsible for setting out company’s direction and strategy. Analyzing customer data can be the solid foundation for every decision, such as, production, R&D and marketing. For example, a car manufacturer wants to set its next year production level. It will need to obtain data regarding the economic environment for next year, customers preference trending, market competition, the trend of material price and other production cost, and a lot more other data to assess the demand and supply of the market. In addition, it will also need internal data, such as financial and budgeting to determine the level of production and whether extra capacity investment will be required.

Improve Marketing ROI
This part should be the most concerned and interested part by every company. The ultimate goal of business is always gaining profit. In fact, using data to accurately target customers and improve ROI of marketing campaigns by companies is not a new thing. However, simple website clickstream analysis, though still important, is just one source of data. In today's environment, the same organizations need to understand customer behavior across channels using more data from within the enterprise and from third parties. Companies keep tracking their customers on the websites and in their stores to get a whole picture of the customers. For example, you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their credit card information, such as shopping patterns

Retain Customer Satisfaction

Retaining customer is one of the most concerned part of corporations. It is crucial part to have business successful. Having customer satisfaction for company is one of the great way to retain loyal customers. Organizations can understand customer satisfaction levels by conducting surveys and social medial sentiment analysis. For example, gathering and integrating all those collected data from different sources, restaurants are able to figure out how satisfied a customer likely is based on factors such as quality of food and quality of staff service.

Embrace a new revenue model

Data is actually changing the business models. And, data is changing the relationship between companies and their customers. Using data analytics, companies are able to provide products or services at higher levels of personalization.  For examples, new economic models are being explored, such as replacing automobile ownership with fleets of self-driving cars and supplementing traditional insurance with micro-insurance options. There is a lot of data out there for free. However, the value of data comes from marrying that data, understanding the missions of a business, and what problem that business is trying to solve.

Detect Fraud and Piracy

Data analytics is a great thing for ecommerce or online retailers. As they are probably selling their products on a lot of different sites. The sales channels often includes Amazon, eBay and online marketplaces maintained by large retailers such as Walmart and Target. Data is available online and easy to access. Selling through all of those channels is very data-intensive, because the pricing, products, and customer types often vary across channels. Sometimes the price discrepancies are so significant they signal potential fraud or piracy.