Customers share data with businesses every day, whether they're buying products, using your website or interacting on social media.

The biggest challenge for businesses is often grappling with the sheer amount of information available. Add in out-of-date systems, siloed teams and complicated databases, and it's no surprise that most companies still only use a small fraction of what's available.

So what can you do to break down the data you have and put it to good use?

Customer data can usually be broken down into four sections: personal, engagement, behavioural and attitudinal.

Personal data

This includes demographic data like:

• Name
• Location
• Gender
• Age
• Job position

Engagement data

Engagement data tells you how customers are reacting to your brand on different marketing channels. This data should be a pivotal part of your marketing strategy, since it lets you know what provides the best return on investment and can help you look for opportunities to develop new products and services.

Engagement data includes:

• Interactions with your website, like number of visits, traffic sources and time spent on a page
• Email open rate, click-through rate and bounce rate
• Social media engagement, such as the number of likes, shares and video views
• Paid advert impressions, cost per click and conversions

Behavioural data

These are the behaviours customers exhibit when using your product or service. Behavioural data helps you to identify underlying patterns customers show on their buying journey.

For example, customers might browse your site on a mobile device but then switch to desktop to make the purchase. Other types of behavioural data are:

• Transactional details, like average order value, subscription details and rate of cart abandonment
• Product usage, including how often features are used and time spent

Attitudinal data

Attitudinal data looks at the feelings of your customers and how they perceive your company or product. It’s primarily qualitative, so you’ll collect it through surveys, interviews, focus groups or customer service feedback.

Attitudinal data includes:

• Customer satisfaction
• Preferences
• Motivations, needs and challenges

Customer data can be used to shape products, solutions and the entire customer buying experience.

Making data-driven decisions is crucial if you want to work productively and efficiently. It lets you spend less time guessing what customers want. Instead, you can spend that time optimising the areas that matter.

Here are five ways to use customer data across your business.

Make the most of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for collecting information. It’s one of the best places to start if you’re learning how to use customer data for the first time.

In addition to showing where customers are coming from (whether it’s a search engine or social media post), it shows you how they move through your website, the pages they linger on and where they exit.

The value of customer data extracted from Google Analytics is that it picks up on activity in real-time. You can observe countless metrics in one dashboard and pinpoint areas for improvement. Rather than guessing where users are dropping off your site, you can target the weakest links straight away.

At online event space marketplace HeadBox, head of marketing Ann-Marie Rossiter encourages the team to use Google Analytics on a daily basis.

One of the best uses of Google Analytics data has been to create and improve their sales funnels.

“It relays to you how people get stuck at certain points and really shows you the opportunities for your business. When you look at how many people enter into the top of the funnel and how many then drop off, you can work out how to optimise each page in order to maximise the chances of them progressing through the funnel and your business making a sale,” she said.

Create a better shopping experience

Your customers’ buying journey should be as seamless as possible. By using data from previous purchases, you can improve your customers’ future experience with your site.

Do you get frequent questions about shipping times or your return policy? Add this information into a follow-up email that goes to customers after their purchase. Do customers regularly buy certain items together? Recommend these items to future customers and maximise your opportunities to up-sell.

Refine your social media strategy

Social media channels are a powerful source of data, thanks to built-in analytical tools like YouTube Analytics and Facebook Insights. These tools enable you to make informed decisions about the types of content that will perform best for your business.

For example, YouTube lets you learn about:

1. Your viewers’ age range, which can help you to tailor content accordingly
2. How long they watch for, allowing you to shorten your videos if you find viewers dropping off halfway through
3. Where in the world your viewers are watching, which can provide some insight into future opportunities
4. Inform customer personas

Customer personas are representations of a segment within your target audience. Despite being fictional, they’re based on real customer data and help companies better understand their audience.

Imagine a marketing team has to write copy for a new campaign. For a business without customer personas, the target audience might look like this:

“Female, 18-35, works in PR.”

For a business with customer personas, the target audience is much clearer for the marketing team:

“Lisa is 28-years-old and works as a PR manager. She’s smart and ambitious, but tends to work inefficiently. As a result, she’s always busy. When it comes to purchasing something new, she buys based on positive online reviews or an engaging social media presence.”

There’s a wealth of customer data that can be used to build your personas, from personal data to how long customers leave products in the shopping cart before they buy.

Once you’ve built up a comprehensive understanding of your customer personas, you’ll be able to better engage with your target audience:

• Create relevant, closely targeted marketing campaigns
• Factor customers’ desires, motivations and challenges into sales conversations
• Improve the consistency of your copy and tone of voice
• Understand where your customers spend time
• Inform product development to better suit your customers’ needs

Allocate budget based on patterns

Customer data can also help businesses allocate budgets effectively. By capturing data on what customers purchase, when and how often, companies can compile a narrative about buying preferences and the average customer journey.

For example, one industrial parts manufacturer studied customer-buying histories, behavioural data and surveys to understand the typical purchasing journey for their highest value products.

The data found that buyers valued recommendations from distributors, rather than trade show demonstrations and collateral. As a result, the marketing team was able to reallocate budgets accordingly.

If you want to encourage data-driven decisions, employees at all levels need to know how to use customer data. That includes finding real-time information, analysing it and acting on the insights gained. Otherwise, any high-level strategies or technological investments won’t have the impact that’s intended.

Offering training is a great place to start. There’s a wealth of useful Google Analytics training courses online, for example.

Think about how you can develop a “data-first” approach too. How can you encourage data-driven thinking in your daily processes? For example, you might start team meetings with a review of the relevant data dashboard. Or you could make it a requirement that customer data has to back up any new investments.

Learning how to use customer data across your business might seem complicated at first. But you’ll quickly see the impact data-led decisions can have on your business productivity and profitability.