What Exactly is Data Monetization?
Data monetization refers to the process of extracting the most amount of potential revenue from a single or multiple sources of data. This is done by capturing, storing, analyzing and dissecting information from data sources.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes can take advantage of data monetization techniques to increase their overall profit and efficiency, whilst simultaneously building up brand loyalty and improving their customer experience.
What can Data Monetization be used to Achieve?
There are many things that data monetization can achieve for a business. Here are some examples to illustrate how such a method can be used to increase your firm’s profitability:
- Mobile network operators – they can utilize anonymous usage data from their subscribers to determine, for example, what demographic of people visit particular areas, what sort of apps they tend to use, and even what times of the day they use their mobile phones;
- Supermarkets – the types of things you purchase can be used to target you with specific promotions that you might be interested in. For example, you could receive details of special offers or coupons applicable to your spending habits, such as 10% off bakery products if you buy lots of bread;
- Filling stations – when you fill up your car with petrol or diesel on a regular basis from a particular filling station, you could be offered vouchers that enable you to receive discounts from the automatic car wash;
- Banks – financial institutions can also leverage the information they hold on you (such as income and expenditure) to offer you financial products that you are likely to be interested in, such as loans, credit cards and savings accounts.
How can I make Data Monetization Work for me?
To take advantage of this potential profit-increasing way of targeting your customers, you will first need to know what to do! The following steps describe the general steps that you need to take in order to fulfil your goals:
- Identify – the very first thing you need to do is determine what sort of information you have available at your disposal. There is no point in trying to target your customers if you know very little about them (for example, they buy your products cash from a retail establishment);
- Store – in order to be able to do something with your data, you need to store it in a way that is easily accessible by your employees for the purposes of data extraction and mining. Many firms that deal with large amounts of data use powerful storage systems called big data appliances;
Access – once you have lots of useful data stored, you will then need to develop a way that enables you to extract and manipulate that information. Data appliances allow you to run queries on stored data much faster than you would on a normal computer system, so that you have the information you need sooner rather than later.