Five steps to monetise your data

With an explosion of data, ambitious brand strategies and demanding bosses, marketers must think carefully about data monetisation to achieve a competitive advantage.
A practical, structured plan is needed, blending short-term wins with long-term strategies to create significant, sustainable revenue streams – what we call ‘data monetisation by design’.
There are two obvious options to create incremental revenue: better meet your customers’ needs to drive increased loyalty, or help a third party to do the same.
Data monetisation typically happens in one of three ways:
· Inside-in: marketers seek ‘lazy’ data assets within the organisation and apply them creatively
· Outside-in: marketers buy third-party data to enable their strategies
· Inside-out: marketers identify internal data that is of value to other brands.
Increased revenue usually flows because a consumer has said ‘yes’ to an offer or experience reaching them in the right way at the right time. For most organisations the challenge of getting the technology-led data explosion in order can seem insurmountable, let alone working out ways to make money from it.
Most businesses reach a point where doing the same thing will mean stagnation so they must become leaner or diversify. Diversification is challenging, but strategic monetisation of your data asset can provide strong revenue opportunities.
To assist, here’s a five-step plan for implementing data monetisation by design:
1: The consumer is king; make sure you understand them. Create a consumer data ‘sandpit’ for your data analysts to work from.
Most organisations have pockets of data that are neither known about nor exploited – you need to find them. Simultaneously, understand and consolidate your existing assets. Find the hidden relationships between data items (e.g. customer services, surveys etc), remembering to be guided by data privacy and compliance laws.
A formal data audit, with the help of a trusted third party, can be highly effective. The more you know about the audience, the more value you can ascribe to data products. Then, consolidate data into an analytical view: is it structured, permissioned, connected to an individual consumer?
2: The consumer must be front-of-mind when thinking about how to meet their needs, through a better product or smarter service or marketing. A creative mindset is required to focus on what data and application could enable the marketer to stand out. Data products should be developed in parallel with a business plan and sales strategy to ensure they generate a return.
3: Focus on the opportunities likely to generate efficient revenue; package existing data assets for sale. Another Acxiom model, the 5R’s of Marketing, is worth considering: recognise your audience, deliver relevant content at the right time, be responsive and nurture engaging relationships to drive incremental return.
4: Having created a regular, profitable revenue stream, your business ought to be more willing to expand the data monetisation programme, but you’ll require fresh data. At numerous points in your journey, you will identify potential data streams. When evaluating these, you need to ask yourself what data are consumers creating? Is there an application for the data and a market for it?
5: Consider what you can do with data you have not already productised. Alternatively, you could release your data products for general consumption under licence and let the market determine their value.
There’s little doubt those brands that really make data monetisation work stand the best chance of being the winners. Consumers better engaged and served through well-managed marketing enabled through data monetisation will buy more and be more loyal going forward. Design your data monetisation for success and you will achieve it.

Jed Mole is European marketing director of Acxiom