Why Is It Easier To Cure Cancer Than To Connect With Today’s Customers?

It’s absolutely amazing to watch how quickly medical science is advancing right now. We’re in a period of unprecedented change. New technologies are being brought together with new understandings of the body, disease, and how the two work against each other by researchers, scientists and clinicians determined to defeat healthcare’s biggest challenges. Almost every day new developments are announced in the fight against cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease and more.

Data: Everyone’s Got It But Not Everyone Knows What To Do With It

Part of the reason we’re seeing medicine advance so quickly is that we’ve become masters of collecting information. Comprehensive patient records, along with research trials, community health studies and more have yielded up a treasure trove of data. These huge datasets have made it possible for the medical field to shave years, even decades, off the timeline toward finding cures.

In the business community, we have access to similar amounts of data. Tracking customer behavior is a huge industry. There are countless ways the shopper’s journey is monitored, from the first touch point to brand loyalty and enthusiasm after a sale. Website analytics and social media metrics work together to ensure that even the smallest retailer scan be deluged in data. Yet we don’t see the presence of huge datasets translating into greater digital sales the way more data equals better medical research results. What’s going on?

4 Ways It’s All Going Terribly, Terribly Wrong

Retail is structured very differently than the healthcare world. Healthcare is, to a large extent, united by a common purpose of healing as many people as possible, whereas retail is inherently competitive. At the same time, while we certainly have think tanks and research firms tracking industry wide trends, looking at customer behavior on the macro level, the insights garnered there aren’t instantly translatable to the individual retailer the way medical discoveries are. Business owners are left to make the leap between the top-level analysis and what they’re experiencing with their customers, but there are four big challenges in their way:

1) No coherent way to view all relevant data

2) Lack of knowledge to analyze said data

3) Not understanding the difference between digital marketing & digital selling

4) Inability to apply data-driven insights appropriately

Problem #1: There Are Too Many Trees In This Forest!

Retailers are provided with an overwhelming amount of data from multiple sources. Each platform has its own unique way of measuring customer activity. Sales venues have exploded in number: in addition to a retailer’s website, customers can make purchases on Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms. Sales are also taking place via email, chat, and text message, all of which generate their own data trail. No two channels record and report data in quite the same way, leaving retailers without an easy-to-understand, complete overview of what’s happening in their business.

Problem #2: What Do All These Numbers Mean?

While analytic skills are expected in the scientist, researcher, and clinician, the same is not true for the retailer. Obviously, the larger and more well-established a retailer is, the more likely they are to have people on board who are capable of looking even poorly organized datasets and identifying meaningful trends and patterns, but for the individual or small chain retailer, the situation is brutally complex and overwhelming. Data without context is just noise, and that noise doesn’t do anything to generate increased sales.

Problem #3: Digital Marketing & Digital Sales Are 2 Different Things

It’s important to understand that different digital tools and strategies have different objectives. Digital marketing focuses on raising awareness and creating customer involvement in the brand relationship; digital sales is the next step, where sales are facilitated using the combination of digital tools and human interaction. Understanding the difference, including what a conversion looks like at each stage, is not knowledge many retailers have.

Problem #4: All These Insights Have No Place To Go!

If a retailer is able to defy the odds and discern actionable insights from the disorganized data set they’re presented with, the absence of clarity regarding the difference between digital marketing and digital sales can still short-circuit the retailer’s goal of increased sales. There is a great need to have a systemized approach to understanding how new understandings and technologies fit into the retailer’s marketing mix.

Moving Forward: The Must-Have Tool Retailers Can Use To Improve the Situation

While retailers may never have access to the coordinated, well-developed research and analysis infrastructure that medical science uses to do the amazing things they do, specific tools do exist to address the issues associated with disorganized datasets. Marketing dashboards far surpass the ad hoc workarounds many retailers have been trying to create, which are generally dependent on Excel spreadsheets and lots of manual labor.

There are two ways to access a marketing dashboard. The first is as a feature of a marketing automation platform you may already be using to manage your social media and other digital marketing efforts. Hubspot is perhaps the most well known in the B2C marketplace, while Marketo dominates in B2B. There is an obvious cost-savings here, as you’re already paying for other services and may incur no additional expenses by using the dashboard; that being said, for more features and what some consider greater objectivity, there are retailers who prefer stand alone marketing dashboard services from business intelligence companies. Included in this category: Good Data, Cyfe and more.

How a Marketing Dashboard Helps

Your marketing dashboard will give you real-time reports from every digital channel you tell the dashboard to monitor. This can include your website, social media presence, advertising campaigns and more. The data gathered is organized for you, generally using charts and graphs that make it easy to understand at a glance what’s happening with your business’ digital presence including by-channel tracking of conversions and revenues.

The marketing dashboard also gives the retailer the opportunity to look at their data over a specific period of time. For example, if you wanted to compare two different channels’ performance over the course of a quarter, that information is instantly available to you. Additionally, some marketing dashboards allow retailers to compare their results with that of their competitors; paralleling the behavior of clinicians coming together to discuss their particular approach to a puzzling patient’s case.

How a Marketing Dashboard Doesn’t Help

While marketing dashboards organize and report data, and even do some preliminary analysis like identifying trends or patterns in customer behavior, it remains on the retailer to think about what those insights mean in the context of the individual business.

Identifying problem areas and determining the best possible solution isn’t necessarily something your dashboard can do for you, particularly when the issues lie in the human element of your business. Discovering, for example, an unacceptably high number lost sales occur after chat or text message contacts between your customer and your store may prompt a retailer to provide additional training or support to the people doing the sales rather than making an investment in new technology. Retailers have to be willing to step back and take a high level, comprehensive view of what’s going on if they hope to hit the ultimate moving target: effectively connecting with today’s customer.