Strategy in data collection is just as important as implementation— Lanre Basamta
By Zion Rufus
As it currently sits, for individuals, governments, marketing, advertising, and PR agencies across the globe, the growing need for data for development impact can never be overemphasized. Where governments require high quality development data for effective policy making and efficient resource allocation, industries require same data for strategic planning, making more informed decisions, and sustaining competitive advantages.
However, not only is the data key, or it’s implementation paramount, tech business professional and Group Head, Financial Services, Interswitch, Lanre Basamta has opined that strategy in data collection is just as important. Strategy in data collection refers to the guidelines on how data is going to be collected, stored, used, managed, shared, and implemented.
The marketing expert said: “From a data perspective, we really still don’t have the strategy right. Having a strategy for data is the most important and even after that is the collection. Everything starts with a strategy, and as marketers in Nigeria, we still don’t seem to have a defined strategy for the data that we are trying to collect; and even when we have a strategy, our implementation is faulty.”
Amongst many other key importance of data in marketing communications, high quality data is used in targeted advertising to track shopping behavior of customers, where they shop, what they buy, how they buy, what they search for online, what they save, and products they search for the most.
Basamta described: “For instance when you walk into an eatery to buy groceries and other things, they collect your name and phone number, some might collect data like date of birth and gender, but how does that data help them, how do they derive the intelligence that gives them enough information on the behavioral pattern of their customers? do they have an app that follows people? do they have things like geo location services that can make them know when I’m at one of their stores, that typically inform them of my purchase decisions?no, they don’t.”
According to Basamta, the required data goes beyond age and gender. The data needed also involves where the customer is in his lifetime journey, financial status , marital status, geography, preferences, time of purchase, salary earning individual or entrepreneur, and more in order to better estimate his purchasing power.
This data helps companies to build up profiles of consumers with their behavioral patterns and shopping habits and other information such as their job and income. Similarly, it also helps advertisers to reach their target audiences with more personalized advertisements.
“Data collection needs to improve, and as we know, data collection is only effective when you provide multiple channel , and touch points. So I think that is critical, we need to design some bit of intelligence.Data is not just to give you insight, it is also supposed to be a cord that strings your customer to you for a long time,” he stated.
“For marketing people, organization watchers, brand managers, if we start with the end in mind about data we will not only collect data more effectively we will also collect it more strategically. Remember strategy is getting there faster, easier and better. So data will not only be to gather insight to make more informed decisions, it will also be used to drive strategic value and increase earnings and lifetime value of a customer as well as a value you can create and sustain. That’s the utopia of marketing, where you are able to extend the lifetime value of a customer.”
In his conclusion, Basamta noted that with the continuous evolution of technology, the development of better data collection strategies shouldn’t be far fetched.
He submitted: “The good news about it today is that technology evolves nonstop, there are technologies that do some of these things intelligently, although Nigerians may not be great adopters of mobile apps, but we have seen a lot of wearable technologies that track not just the user but also his experiences. So these technologies follow the user across his geographies and across his different time zones to the point where you are able to know sufficiently about the customer and can begin to send him things like micro targeting communications. At that point, you have sufficient intelligent data that tells you who the customer is beyond just a buyer of a particular product. The more you know the customer is the more you are able to adequately service him and also the more you are able to keep him.”
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