Business today is increasingly data-based - and with every click, swipe and subscription, your company is collecting this valuable stuff. That’s all very well but if your data is isolated from your core operational metrics it’s not pulling its weight in terms of strategic value. This is where behavioural data comes in.
When looking for a more effective operational flow, behavioural data - married with the right tech kit - can help to inform every single decision that your business makes while revealing deeper insights about what makes your customers tick.
A recent report by Accenture revealed that companies who have embraced behavioural data enjoy up to
38% higher productivity and faster innovation cycles. Sounds good? Let’s take a closer look.
1. Getting Personal Through Smart Customer Insights
Unless your business is in a super-niche industry you’ll no doubt have competitors snapping at your heels constantly as the digital universe becomes ever more crowded. These days, marketing is the most effective tool at your disposal when it comes to creating a unique and engaging brand image - and this goes hand in hand with understanding customer motivation and behaviour. Because of this, lots of companies choose to enlist the help of
market research companies to help them dig deeper into the mindset of their existing and potential customers.
These companies specialise in surveys, panels and workshops which are designed to capture intent signals; the stuff that makes a customer seek out and buy a particular product or service. This can be really helpful in finding out which features or services your audience is after - and figuring out how you compare with your competition.
These state of the art platforms integrate multiple aspects including:
- Cookie‑based tracking
- SDKs in mobile apps
- Server‑side event collectors
This raw data is then used to log page views and content interactions which in turn speaks to context and scale and a sense of clarity to ensure that your development aligns with a genuine market demand.
Why do we need clickstream analysis?
This important tool tracks the digital journey of each of your users - kind of like following them around a shop but in a non-creepy way. By doing this, it collects all sorts of intel, like page views, clicks and heven ow much time the user is spending on different parts of your website.
And once you’ve bagged all this information, you can use it to map user interactions in detail – and identify the kind of patterns that ultimately lead to conversions. An example of this might be a user who visits a particular product page multiple times before finally making a purchase; indicating a high level of interest. Having this information to hand means that you can fine-tune your marketing efforts to laser target this product to particular demographics.
2. Finding Where Customers Are With Geolocation Tools
What is geolocation data?
This is the clever stuff that tells your Uber driver where to find you - in simple terms, it's the tech that figures out the actual position of an electronic device through GPS satellites, cellular towers, Wi-Fi access points and IP address lookups. How does this help your business? Geolocation data can be inserted into streaming platforms or data warehouses for use by your marketing department who can convert them into geofenced triggers. Your business can then deliver timely offers every time a potential customer enters a key zone. But why should marketing have all the fun? Your logistics team can also use this technology with live coordinates to adjust routes around traffic or weather delays.
Location data for contextual targeting
So, we’ve told you a little bit about how a geolocation service can help your business - but it can only do this if you choose the right service for your needs. Contextual targeting is all about understanding where your digital interactions occur as this allows you to tailor responses to your user’s physical environment.
Sometimes you absolutely, positively need precise IP enrichment, so what do you do?
Discover IPinfo’s location data API stands out as a solid example of what's out there. This API (Application Programming Interface) returns information in under ten milliseconds and resolves an IP address into precise fields like:
- city
- region
- Latitude
- longitude
- carrier
- connection type for IP
Once this information is inside your data lake, your marketing platforms can use it to deliver
region-specific offers to your customers. Not only that but, when someone visits your website, you can see not only where they are but what form of connection they’re using.
Making your resources work for you
Demand and interest in a product or service tends to ebb and flow in different regions - and being able to track and understand this is essential. This technology will allow your operations teams to quickly and easily spot high-density zones through signals which are converted into movement heatmaps.
If you are, for example, a retailer you can follow these trends and then shift inventory to the stores where foot traffic spikes - or reroute vehicles around heavy congestion areas. This sophisticated tool removes the need for guesswork in your resource planning and simply funnels assets into the places where they’ll have the greatest impact.
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3. Data‑Led Growth For Your Company
Establish centralized management dashboards
It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of data for the modern business and collating, storing and analysing this is key. A centralised management dashboard is the way forward for giving you a unified view of your performance metrics across each and every department. These essentially corral your data into one single interface to spot trends and create effective strategies. This includes:
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software
- marketing automation
- financial systems
Your dashboard will also give you an at-a-glance overview of your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and allow you an overview of revenue velocity, customer churn rate and operational uptime.
Getting Ahead of the Sales Curve
Like most, your sales team no doubt generates a continuous
stream of transactional data, looking at factors such as deal velocity, average contract value, pipeline-to-revenue rations and sales cycle duration. This means that it is of paramount importance that your data is all snuggled up to your demand planning software. Advanced platforms can ingest these quote‑to‑cash metrics and then combine them with behavioral signals to refine the replenishment schedules for your business.
These platforms use predictive algorithms to analyse important stuff like seasonality, pipeline health and win-loss trends to project future orders. They are also pretty nifty at forecasting confidence intervals in the market in order to notify stakeholders in the event that your projections and actual market movements don’t quite match.
Making Your Workflows Work Harder
When workflows are disjointed they don’t, well, work. For this reason, it's essential to establish automated processes to really get the most out of your data and use your findings to produce actionable tasks across your teams.
This is where event driven automation really comes into its own by setting up systems that respond to specific triggers, like:
- Sudden dips in sales
- Unexpected surges in website traffic
- High abandonment rates during checkout
- Spikes in support ticket volume
- Abrupt changes in product usage patterns
For instance, a detected decline in customer engagement metrics can automatically prompt your marketing team to launch a targeted campaign; as well as telling your sales team to adjust their outreach strategies.
4. Accelerate Time‑To‑Market
How the Internet of Things can speed up your process
In fast‑moving markets
every second really does count. For this reason, a great number of businesses are supercharging their operations by blending user behavior streams with IoT telemetry.
Integrating IoT into your operations gives you greater visibility over your end‑to‑end workflows through sensor readings that are able to monitor the status of your equipment and track environmental conditions. The result? A complete, up-to-the-minute dataset that streamlines development and speeds up your time to market.
Building predictive models with session data
Predictive models are algorithms which are trained to identify patterns in past behaviour in order to figure out what might happen next. This effectively allows your business to be proactive rather than reactive. To build these models effectively, your company must combine rich session-level user data with detailed
system telemetry. These sessions track the way in which users navigate a site including the actions taken and the sticking points. In the meantime, telemetry keeps an eye on what’s going on behind the scenes such as load speeds and background errors. These two streams combine to form a dream team which will optimise journeys, prevent drop-offs and allow you to plan infrastructure based on expected demand.
The Path to Future Innovation Lies With Unified Data
Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Then it’s time to combine the superpower of data insight with advanced technology. This will help you to make smarter decisions as well as giving you a real competitive advantage. You’ll get fuller, deeper insights into customer motivation and new opportunities through pattern identification.
And with so much competition out there, this dynamic data duo is the way forward if you’re looking to stay one step ahead of the rest.
