Just barely more than one-tenth of organizations have a high degree of confidence that they are leveraging their available customer data. But why? It could be that the customer data remains in the hands of only select decision makers.

In addition, the 400 cross-industry executives surveyed by a Forbes Insights research study titled Data Versus Goliath: Customer Data Strategies to Disrupt the Disruptors, said customer data and analytics are key enablers of disruption. And, 55% of those executives report that they are able to disrupt their markets by leveraging knowledge and insights from their customer bases.

Which, as the study infers, is a goliath task. James Chung, president of Reach Advisors, shares that the amount of data at our fingertips is growing so exponentially that it’s not an easy proposition. He shares additional insight in this short video.

Many home builders are exploring new approaches to data science in their marketing and sales efforts.

“At Dan Ryan Builders we are leveraging consumer segmentation through a third party source and overlapping that information with Hanley Wood data to ensure that new communities contain the right homes at the right pricing,” says Char Kurihara, vice president of corporate branding at Dan Ryan Builders. “This allows us to be smarter with our asset allocation as a smaller mid-sized builder with less capital than larger, public home builders. Where we have work to do is the importance of the customers’ journey before they ever cross the model home threshold. We had thought that we were mapping that journey, but we have gaps to fill to ensure that the consumers can find and interact with us more easily.”

“A new age of marketing is definitely upon us, and those who don’t consider themselves data-based marketers will put themselves and their organizations at a huge disadvantage,” says Carrie Schonberg, chief marketing officer, Ashton Woods. “With all of the data now available at our fingertips, the key for any marketer is to ensure you move beyond reporting and really dive into analytics to uncover actionable insights.  The data is incredible, but it only has value when you are able to use it to drive decision-making and take action to fuel the business.”

As the Forbes Insight research reports, customer-data-driven enterprise is about empowering employees, but only 14% of the executives have given employees full autonomy to act on data insights. So, there’s a case for full exposure to all parts of the organization, even beyond marketing.

Schonberg also uses data through the entire marketing process; from strategy to execution to optimization. The builder creates profiles on its buyers at the community level to understand them at a granular level, and therefore find and target look-alike audiences. Schonberg also cycles through data that shows the effectiveness of all the marketing vehicles she uses in the entire customer journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion. Her data science process is to understand the return on investment and therefore prime future marketing strategy.  

The future of data use is upon us and certainly will not be slowing down any time soon.

This story appears as it was originally published on our sister site, www.hiveforhousing.com.