How to Maximize Value and Revenue from your Data
As technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace while business models and devices get smarter and more connected, companies big and small continue to amass growing stores of data.
Kitty Kolding
Some of that data is put to good use, improving personalization efforts for existing customers, powering AI tools that deliver high-impact buying recommendations, tracking productivity and managing ad targeting with tremendous precision. But a lot of your data – by some estimates more than 70% of corporate data – is laying around, taking up space in your hybrid cloud environment, doing absolutely nothing for you. That’s got to stop.
The first thing to do is cut yourself some slack. You’re already insanely busy and no one who has a day job can fully keep up with the crazy explosion of models, partnerships, formats and uses that now affect data utilization. Everyone is grappling with this, and there’s no silver bullet.
Success here is the product of continuous learning, well thought-out testing and experimentation, a willingness to be realistic about your organization, and a high level plan to guide what objectives you have for your data assets.
The next thing we recommend is a 3-step process, to get your arms around the realities:
1) INVENTORY. What data assets do you possess? From where or what do they originate? Make note of the characteristics of the data. When we guide clients through this process, the first pass focuses on at least 6 main characteristics: Coverage, Recency, Depth, Uniqueness, Accuracy, Geography. This helps establish Data Value, and serve as a foundation for the next few steps.
2) UTILIZATION. Then take a good hard look at what you’re doing with your data now, and what else is possible, based on the kind of data you have. This is where you spot the laziest of data – heaping piles of perfectly viable data elements loafing around in a dark, private corner while you work your tail off in that noisy, open floor plan.
We think of data uses as being in four categories, broadly speaking: Internal Initiatives; Customer Facing efforts; External Uses related to marketing, thought leadership, sales and PR; and Revenue Generating Programs that directly monetize your data. There are a handful of subcategories under each of these to be considered, but at first, map which of these your data assets are supporting. Then note which data assets aren’t doing a single thing. That right there is your lazy data. But it’s important to also note that some data can do double and triple duty – those assets are in use, but are underutilized and need to get better exploited.
3) MONETIZATION. Now that you know what you have and what it’s doing (or not doing), it’s time to make a plan to monetize your data – as much of it as possible. Start by prioritizing – what’s most important? Generating incremental revenue? Or is the strategic value more pressing right now, including using your data to drive marketing, sales, product launches, customer success programs and internal efficiencies?
If it’s revenue you’re looking for, the goal is to look at all the ways you can monetize your data. We tend to run clients through a list of 10 separate monetization approaches and earmark the top 2 or 3 that are workable to start with. The most common options range from licensing or renting data for dozens of different purposes; syndicating it; engaging with exchanges, swaps and co-ops; using the data for validation/verification/enrichment; and building out APIs for specific use cases. Each of these has a cost/benefit analysis to be considered, and of course compliance with privacy law and privacy policies is paramount. But, every data asset should be studied to establish the relevant range of monetization approaches, and which ones you can practically activate.
If instead your greatest need is extracting strategic value from your data, then you need to look at whether internal efficiencies and insights are more important, or, whether you’d benefit more from repackaging your data into some powerful new formats for externally facing objectives. As repackaged, you can give your sales team and marketing programs a huge boost, but it does require the skill of talented analysts, writers, visualizers and designers to pull this new aspect of value from the bits and bytes. You can outsource this work to teams like ours, or, build your own with some time and effort.
If you’d like to see some frameworks that we use to help clients with these considerations, check out our Data Monetization white paper and the accompanying interactive scorecard. The Scorecard gives you a private, point-and-click workspace to quickly create a data inventory, establish value characteristics of your data, identify what you’re doing with your data, and what your other options are. Most people build their plans in 10 minutes or less using the Scorecard. It’s also free, and we hope, useful on your data journey.
For questions or ideas, or to air data disagreements, contact me anytime at kitty@chrysalis.partners.