87 Reading: Types of Marketing Information
Illuminating the Marketing Picture
There are three primary types of marketing information marketers use to gain insights that will contribute to wise marketing choices: internal data, competitive intelligence, and marketing research.
Internal Data
Internal data consists of the information companies collect about their customers and prospective customers, typically as part of their internal operations. Marketing departments, for example, maintain information about the interest and leads they generate from prospective customers and how they are interacting with these contacts. They may capture information used for segmentation and targeting purposes, such as geographic location, gender, age, buying behaviors, and communication preferences. Information about website visitors, traffic, and other customer engagement activities can be another useful type of internal data. Additionally, sales teams capture and maintain information about who is buying the product, where buyers are located, buying patterns, and behaviors. Sales and marketing teams may also maintain information about customer references, success stories, and how prospective customers are progressing toward becoming new clients.
Other parts of the organization also capture and maintain data that may be useful as marketing information. Accounting and billing departments track information about customers such as how much they spend with the organization, when they buy, and other payment details. Product managers and customer support organizations maintain information about customers implementing or using products, problems or issues they run into, and satisfaction levels with the company and products.
Organizations capture and maintain internal data by using information systems and databases shared across multiple departments. A database is a set of structured data accessible via a computer, and the data can be organized so that it’s available for a variety of different uses, such as marketing or financial analysis. Today’s powerful computers, cheap data storage, and the era of Big Data mean that data is at the heart of many companies marketing strategies. Shared information systems may include large enterprise systems designed to support business processes and functions, customer support systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, among others.
Database marketing, also known as marketing analytics, takes internal data several steps further. Large databases collect massive amounts of data from a variety of sources: customer demographic and profile data linked to in-store and online purchasing history, website search terms, page views, social media posts, Internet of Things (IoT), and other data. In a process called data mining, computer algorithms search for patterns in the data and generate recommendations and insights about how to increase sales.
With access to accurate, up-to-date internal data, marketers gain a better understandi