Mine Your Systems

The more you know about your customer (and leads), the less you put your marketing dollars at risk. You don’t need a big marketing research study to create segments. You probably have much of the information already – in your systems. Start there. Here’s what you want to know.

• Who your customers are. Pull reports from your various systems to identify your best customers based on firm profile (industry, number of employees, total sales, key contact job titles) or personal profile (age, gender, race, education).
• How they behave. Wherever you engage customers, troves of helpful data stored there tell you who they are, what content they consume, where they come from and more.
• What their attitudes are. Online reviews provide a wealth of what customers care about. Look at ratings and comments left on reviews sites for your company and your competitors.

Collecting and curating this information will enable you to create segments and provide clues to what customers like, dislike and want.