Four ways marketers can create useful actions from archiving technologies
As archiving technologies are more widely adopted, it’s becoming apparent they can also be used proactively to strengthen businesses and create opportunity.
Whilst businesses already use email archiving to meet regulatory compliance requirements, this is largely done to avoid penalties or maintain audit trails.
But strategic use of comprehensive communications archives can actually help firms better understand the impact of their communications, analyse data for business insights, and respond to evolving environments.
We’ve identified four key areas where archiving can add value:
Understand the impact of communications
Although compliance monitoring is essential, having a clear picture of what firms are doing well can help highlight strengths and successes.
To discover new insights, firms need to be able to “listen as an organisation.” Businesses can, for example, track how quickly and effectively their sales and services teams reply to customer communications.
In addition, marketers can glean insights into the most advantageous sales terminology, gaining a better understanding of successful customer engagement approaches, which can subsequently be integrated into future marketing assets.
Manage risk
Technology solutions that compile, index, and connect communications channels can help firms address risk factors. Once baselines are established, exceptions in communications can be flagged, which complement cyber security measures.
By extracting measurable intelligence, firms can track progress toward goals
Rogue employees, dissatisfied customers and potentially negative incidents can be identified before irreversible damage is done. Both customer and employee mentions of competitor brand names, products, and services can be tagged and analysed, ultimately enhancing competitive intelligence efforts.
In short, having an holistic oversight of a firms’ full suite of communications can reduce the risk of “dark corners”. This is essentially where remote teams, third party suppliers, or unmonitored social media accounts could wreak havoc with corporate reputation, business outcomes, or service delivery.
Quantify and analyse unstructured data
Many marketing technologies track the basic metrics of communications efforts. It’s fairly straightforward to compile likes, shares, follows, and mentions on social media platforms, for example whether on the platform themselves, or via a social engagement platform such as Hootsuite. But a lot of communications activity also produces unstructured data (text, pictures, photos, videos) that doesn’t fit neatly into a relational database.
This unstructured data is much more meaningful when retained in its native format along with its metadata (dates and times, user names and handles, physical locations, device details, etc.,) yet there are few technology solutions that can contextualise this type of data.
Comprehensive archiving can automate the collection and indexing of this type of data and make it available for firms to measure a number of things. These include evaluating product and service quality from a client’s perspective, and ranking the quality of leads and relationships created by social media efforts.
By extracting measurable intelligence, firms can track their progress toward business goals, and identify where efforts are missing the mark.
Future ready
Archiving enhances the value of any investment made in data governance, knowledge workers, and core competencies. Enabling firms to have their proverbial finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, market trends, and emerging challenges is an organic approach to staying agile.
Firms can document successes and build on them. Likewise, this intelligence enables firms to learn from projects.
None of this, of course, is possible without casting a wide enough net and storing the captured data in a secure, reliable and search-ready state.
By actively seeking to understand the nuances of the market through the lens of communications, firms will be able to respond quicker to unexpected developments. Not only does this allow the collection and scrutiny of data to solve today’s challenges, it also enables firms to future-proof their business.
Comprehensive, automated archiving is a powerful strategic tool. Businesses are best placed to use it to drive business growth and gain advantage over competitors who don’t have the tools to mine their data gold.
Source: http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2016/may/24/four-ways-marketers-create-useful-actions-archiving-technologies/