Trying to market without constant data collection is like stumbling down the street with your eyes closed.

Data collection is not an extra activity that will make your marketing better; instead, it’s as essential to your company’s existence as breathing is essential to your personal existence. And like respiration, it’s not something you can do once and be done with it; you can’t even do it once every quarter or once every month. It has to be a constant and ongoing process.

To look at it another way, consider how silly it would be if you were to use your eyes once every few weeks, then shut them again and see how far you could get with your eyes closed until you opened them again at some point in the future. For those of us who have our vision, seeing is inextricably linked with how we navigate our lives. When it comes to running a marketing team, we need to look at data collection the same way.

Here are 3 ways that data can empower your marketing team:

  1. Improve customer responsiveness. The intelligent use of data and analytics will enhance the quality and speed of your responsiveness to your customers.
  2. Increase customer acquisition and reduce customer churn. Customer analytics can give your sales and marketing teams key information that will help you find and keep customers. Data analytics increase marketers’ ability to get beyond campaign execution and focus on how to make customer relationships more successful, leading to greater customer loyalty and improving customer lifetime.
  3. Increase revenue per customer. Customer analytics can also help you ensure that your loyal customers are happy to buy more of your product by giving you the information you need to improve and develop the products they want.

Keep in mind that data is fluid. It doesn’t ever give you a final answer. Because the world is constantly changing at an ever-increasing pace, data changes as well. This requires an outlook that is far more flexible than what we may have been accustomed to in the past. As new information comes in, even our approach to data collection will constantly evolve.

What doesn’t change? The need to keep our “eyes” constantly open, so that we know exactly what’s going in our product’s market.