It may not sound very exciting but the real “gold“ in today’s digital business world is customer data.

It still surprises me how many companies in South Africa do not understand the power of data, or if they do, they have not yet harnesses the ability to drive effective communications to that data.

Effective communications in the Digital Fire handbook means that it achieves the end goal of a business – which is to drive a profit!

At the turn of the century, four of the five top companies in the world, based on market cap, were old-style ‘industrial’ entities: GE (manufacturing), Walmart (retail), Exxon (energy) and Citi (financial services). By 2016 the data titans were firmly in charge. The five global leaders were Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon – all businesses that built their empires by managing data.
Customer data is crucial, whatever your business; if you are a small pizza chain or a massive ecommerce retailer.

It allows you to communicate with your customer, understand their buying behaviour, listen to their needs and wants, and keep them coming back for more.

The key with data management is to ensure that a comprehensive strategy is employed to ensure that the data is collected, analysed and utilised in an efficient manner.

Ideally a company’s data should be managed so that individual customer numbers, are coupled with transactional codes, which allows customer behaviour to be analysed and personalised marketing to be created and served. When this powerful circle is created the customer experience is improved enormously and so are the sales.

Elon Musk’s Tesla empire may produce vehicles and solar products, but its core competency is driving sales by exploiting the vast flood of data from its ubiquitously connected products.

A key focus for Digital Fire this financial year will be to assist clients to comprehend the sales numbers that can be generated by effective management of data and to provide that A-Z solution.

It involves the bringing together of technology, marketing and management and we call this SIMS: Smart integrated Management System.

Watch this space!