Every time your organization collects a new data point, you have found another gold flake in the river of information that is rushing through our economy. Your organization collects an immense amount of these gold flakes on a daily basis, so how can you turn them into cash flow? 

Data can be monetized by being directly sold to buyers and also by being applied to business strategies to drive revenue. If your organization is wondering what methods should be used in your data monetization strategy, these three ways to monetize data will get you started on the path to successfully turning your data gold into revenue.

1. Gain Insights to Create Profitable Products & Services

Organizations can derive monetary value from their data by simply staying informed on market trends and the latest customer demands. Data is your organization’s most useful tool for getting to know your customer base. 

Customer satisfaction is one of the highest determining factors of a successful business, so honing in on current customer preferences and what customers may prefer in the future is highly valuable. By staying up to date on customer data, organizations can create more relevant and personalized products and services, which leads to more revenue. 

Your organization should be gathering data on customer preferences, interests, behaviors and demographics through customer surveys, purchases, and website analytics on a day-to-day basis. With that information, your organization can not only create better products and services, but can also generate advertisements, social media, and other content that will connect with your customers in a highly personalized way. 

By applying your data to create the best products, services, and customer experiences, you are guaranteeing increased profits. For example, you can use data to determine which customer profiles are most likely to respond to certain advertisements. When companies target ads more accurately, an increased amount of customers will inevitably respond and make a purchase, therefore increasing the ROI of marketing campaigns and reducing wasted advertising dollars. 

Constantly improving customer experiences with the insight you’ve gleaned from your data also establishes customer loyalty, increases the lifetime value of each customer, and leads to increased customer referrals. 

2. Increase Efficiency and Cut Company Costs

Data can also be used to make more informed decisions, streamline business operations, reduce company expenses, and improve ROI. Your organization can save time and money by optimizing processes, reducing transportation and logistics expenses, automating jobs with AI, and much more. 

Making more informed decisions with your data can help you identify new opportunities and pinpoint what areas of your company could improve efficiency in order to reduce resource waste. Data also allows organizations to evaluate performances of employees, marketing campaigns, and product sales. 

For instance, data shines a spotlight on products that have high sales and products that have low sales, which can help your organization decide which products should be discontinued and which products should be promoted. You can also dive even deeper into your data to gain insights on why certain products perform better than others. 

By accessing more specific data, companies can eliminate mistakes they’ve made with past products, predict future product performance, and perhaps even incorporate features from successful products into struggling products to save them from discontinuation.

3. Generate New Streams of Revenue

A company's data is an extremely valuable asset. In fact, when a company is valued in preparation for a potential sale, the value of that company's data is included in the overall valuation. Selling your data is definitely a lucrative venture, especially if your organization’s data is unique. No matter what kind of data your company has stored, there is a market for it. 

For instance, the farm equipment and tractor manufacturer John Deere generates over a billion dollars a year by selling their data to farmers. They collect data using an intelligent farming system that gathers information on soil and weather, and then use that data to provide recommendations to farmers on what to plant, when to plant it, how much fertilizer to use, and more. Another exemplary company, Visa, makes over a billion dollars a year selling data to retailers who want information on customer purchase patterns. 

The most cost-effective way to sell data is through a data exchange. These are platforms that allow you to upload your data into a marketplace and make it available to interested parties within the exchange. 

Data exchanges like Narrative’s data marketplace minimize traditional barriers to entry in the data selling game by providing an ecommerce experience. These exchanges make it easy for organizations to package, publish, and sell their own data as well as find and buy data that could be useful.

Using Narrative’s Data Shops, a suite of intuitive apps, your organization is provided with the data monetization tools needed to build a full functional data shop in just a few hours. Instead of having to burn through resources by hiring data engineers, developers, salespeople, and legal and financial teams, you can stand up an attractive data shop with neatly packaged products on your own.

Anyone can easily create a fully functional data business in as little as a day by using the Data Shops apps, even with no coding or design experience. We make it easy to ingest all of your data into our data lake, package that data into products, and set up an ecommerce storefront to sell your data to the buyers who are searching for it. 

Start Monetizing Your Data Today with Narrative

With Narrative’s data collaboration platform, you can buy data that will help you gain better insights and cut costs, as well as sell data to generate a new revenue stream for your organization. Narrative provides you the data monetization tools that you need in order to streamline the data selling process and start generating revenue. 

Want to learn more about launching your data business? Get started today by speaking to one of our experts!