If you're barely keeping your fingers on the dam when it comes to keeping up with customer demands, congratulations. Clearly you've been able to generate a high amount of business, even an amount that your competitors might envy. But as you're running fast and furious to make sure you're meeting all of your customers' needs for your products and services, you might want to take a moment to stop and think about something: It's one thing to have €enough€ customers. But are you doing what it takes to help you find your best customers?

The importance of good business intelligence:

In order to get you the results you need, your business intelligence should yield insightful - and actionable - data that helps you sustain and grow your business. The business of gathering intelligence can be applied to a number of channels within a business, from technology, communication, marketing or research and development.

In some instances, your unexamined website analytics alone will lead you to surprising information about e-commerce patterns, untapped or unmet customer needs, and which customers may be underperforming when compared with what you think you know about their interactions with your brand. Taking a hard look at this data will help you make better decisions about who your customers are, and how to find your best customers within existing inbound marketing channels.

What types of data nuggets should your business mine?

In many cases, it's recommended that a business start with its own historical sales data, such as mentioned in the website analytics example above. But before you begin, it's best that you establish a roadmap and a set of goals to guide your business data gathering process. Among the questions you'll want to answer for yourself are:

1. What internal marketing channels do we want to analyze?

2. Do we want to hire an agency to conduct other market research activities for us?

3. How long do we need to analyze our data?

4. Which team members will be responsible for leading this process?

5. What will we do with the data once we've analyzed it?

Seeking a data partner.

Working with a marketing agency that's experienced and savvy when it comes to data mining and analysis can be an excellent use of your company's resources. Not only can your agency guide, advise or even manage the development of a data mining plan that helps you find your best customer, the agency can also help you outline action items that come as a result of the business intelligence you gather. And as an added benefit, the agency can provide the €outsider's€ perspective that can prove crucial to this effort's success. Because your agency has no preconceived notions about any of your customers, and no €skin in the game€ when it comes to any of the elements of your current marketing program, you can rely upon your agency partner to make neutral recommendations that are based on your business's best interests.