Why would a content distribution platform need data analytics?
The phrase “data analytics” is almost a cliche to mention when discussing strategies now. Everyone knows that is it helpful, but is it really necessary and how strategically important it is to content distribution platforms? The answer is yes, it is very important. Many of these companies are targeting smaller-sized firms in the market and serve niche markets. Therefore, having a competitive advantage against other firms becomes critical. Data analytics can help companies remain competitive in the market by improving customer satisfaction, reducing operational costs, and exploring new market opportunities.
Improve customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction plays a critical role in increasing customer loyalty and long-term revenue. High customer satisfaction can potentially improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns and drive up the retention rate. Thus, managing customer satisfaction should be an important part of business operations to retain competitive advantages, and that’s where data analytics can come into play. Analyzing customer data can help you better understand those you are serving, help you provide better services, and deliver more meaningful information to them.
1. Provide more useful services
One thing that many content distribution platforms compete on is the number of useful services it provides to the customers. A blog published by HubSpot mentioned steps to build a content distribution strategy for firms. We could see that merely delivering the content is not enough anymore. If your platform can help customers complete the task of content distribution, while tracking the performance of these contents and even bring actionable insights through the data, then your customers wouldn’t need to check out the functionalities at other platforms anymore. Data analytics would not only enable you to provide your services, but you could also get a sense of which features are most liked by customers from analyzing the data of your platform.
2. Deliver more accurate information
Another important aspect of the platforms is to improve the quality of the information they are delivering to the customers. Maybe other platforms can track the click-through-rate of content as well, but if your platform can track it more accurately, then that can become a critical advantage. Sometimes, the problem related to data accuracy is more critical. If the data was recorded wrong and that made the customers make the wrong decisions, then that can severely harm the brand image. In 2016, Facebook apologized for a major mistake it made when reporting the calculated video metric to its users. This has greatly impacted its reputation, and data integrity was brought to people’s attention. There are risks associated with using analytics, but the best we can do is to check the algorithm over and over again, and fix the issue as soon as possible. Part of data analytics involves data cleaning, and unifying or normalizing data at this stage can improve the quality of the data, thus deliver more meaningful insights to the customers.
Reduce operational costs
Data analytics can also help companies reduce costs by using their resources more efficiently. In the context of digital content distribution, predicting the demand for computing power can be a good example. As big data becomes a dominant trend, many companies have moved to cloud computing. One of the benefits of cloud computing is flexibility, which means users can scale services to fit their needs, and they can pay by the amount of services they use. Thus, if a company can predict its demand during a certain period of time, then it can pay for less cloud computing capacity during off-seasons and raise the capacity back again during high-demand seasons.
Identify new market opportunities
Lastly, data analytics can help companies identify new market opportunities. A unique benefit that content distribution platforms have is the data related to all the content made by its clients. For example, social media content platforms can explore to see what kind of business gets the highest click-through-rate on each social media platform. If it is able to observe some patterns, then it can offer more targeted distribution services to its customers. Just like SAS mentioned in its article “Big Data Analytics: What it is and why it matters,” data analytics can uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and other insights. Companies can potentially find harder to duplicate and more unique strategies with the help of analytics.
There are many benefits of using data analytics to assist with strategic moves for content distribution platforms. However, we need to remember that if the algorithm was not set up correctly, then the insights may lead us in the wrong direction. Building a strategy is a collaborative effort, and analytics could only play an assistive role.
References
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/benefits-of-cloud-computing
https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html
