How secure your information and data online? 7 basic steps to stay away from vulnerability.

As a result of the digital transformation, most of us became the excessive users of digital products and platform. Along with the heaviest consumption of social media, we also have given our personal information, data and access to our social networks in many places for various purposes. 

The biggest challenge of digitalization is the safety and security of our information like -PII (personally identifiable information), transactional details, demographic, sociographic, technographic, behavioural data of users and so many other categories. All these data has been used by various companies, for example, to create tailored marketing campaigns that enable individualization into the business processes. 

Sustainability of any business depends on the revenue it generates and the profit it makes. As the competition became more, companies are forced to understand the users or audience in-depth to monetize and cater them better. It basically gave them a cutting edge in the market by increasing the performance through optimisation, predictability, individualisation, cost reduction etc. 

In addition, sometimes the user data even end up in the dark web which is more vulnerable to users By giving permissions to various apps and websites, or without the proper protection, we are actually opening up the door to the world to steal our data and track whatever we perform online.

Data has collected from an internet user in many ways such as through social media access, cookies, fun games in the social network channels(for example, d*****e in facebook helps users to find out their matching character to a movie star role, etc)

As each element of data is very important and sensitive, it is critical to secure whatever we do online. Because none of the users doesn't know how this data will be used and for what purpose and where it will be ended up.

How do we secure our Data online?

There are many ways in which we can protect our user data and information online from hackers and others. For example,

1. Install proper protection application/tools on your machine.

2. Do not provide the complete details on any social network sites.

3. Do not play any kind of data sharing games on social network sites

4. Clear the Cookies installed on browsers

5. Read the permissions carefully before authorising anything.

6. Use Secure browser for banking and transactions
7. Do not install pirated versions third party applications

In spite of making our life more easier and connected, the online medium has a lot of dangerous and vulnerable or dark side issues that has to taken care of to stay away from the troubles.

Data has become the base for all the modern business decisions and actions. And the data collection and analysis became much easier than ever. So the essentiality of protecting the information in online become unavoidable.

How could sponsor brands get benefit from Club's fan base?

Over the past couple of years, the sports and event market has grown to a lucrative and hundreds of billion dollars worth business sector. Sponsorship became one of the main profitable channels of income to teams.

Sponsors pay millions every year to be associated with teams and events to increase the brand awareness and sales to a wide range of audience. Like other marketing activities, sponsorship is not 100% measurable. Now it's time for brands to look beyond reaching millions of clubs fans with brand names by making use of fan intelligence.

How do fan intelligence help brands to increase Revenue?

As part of  Club's data strategy, they started collecting data across ticketing, social, merchandise, retail, hospitality as well as its community and website. Clubs are building intelligence on this data to increase their revenue as well as to provide fans with a tailored experience.

Sponsors can now ask for additional marketing rights from teams to  use their fan data for brands targeted marketing campaigns. At present, sponsorship limited to things like Logo & Name on Team Jersey, Countable Social Media Mentions &  Press Coverages and Rights to Activate Marketing Campaigns with 2 to 3 players.  Apart from a global reach through club fans, the number of benefits is limited.

Sponsors have to sign specific deals to use clubs fan data. They can utilise the Data and Intelligence of Fans like it used by the team or any business. Because the price of media is increasing every year and the insights on fans help brands to optimise and execute channel specific marketing activities. This in-depth knowledge on fans allows brands to work on where they spend out ad budgets and whom to target as well as what markets to focus through club's channels.

The advanced level insights on fans help sponsors to plan and execute targeted and tailored marketing campaigns around the year that is even after the tournament gets over. Its helps brands to associated with team long term to achieve the scale.

The long-term association and relationship by brand increase the engagement, conversion and loyalty among fans and also helps to understand the behavioural evolution of people. This helps to build more detailed profiles of potential customers and gives an improved ability to monetization of fans in the local and global market.

Targeted messages to teams supporter database can lead to higher opt-ins and sales. This new system assists in utilising marketing budget properly and brings a greater valuation to the sponsorship deal.

"Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway." – Geoffrey Moore

In short, sponsors with intelligence on club fan base would be able to drive additional revenue through various touch points. It could be either through clubs or sponsor brands channels. Data and Analytics activates series of customized marketing and loyalty activities year around.

How does Fan Relationship Management(Fan Insights) helped Sports club's to drive better revenue?

Fan analytics are used in all phase of business to take better data-driven results as well as to meet specific business objectives. Fan Data and Analytics is widely implemented in sports business to improve the revenue and engagement.

The main reason sports brands and organisations started looking at the data is because of the reducing number of attendance for in-stadia games, merchandise and ticket sales, engagement and etc..

Till recent years, the data has been captured for the on-field game performance improvement. For example, Player performance analysis, on-field injury analysis,fitness analysis, game statistics,competitor players and game analysis etc. But the trend has changed now because it became important to generate higher revenue as important to win matches .

Most of the English Premier League, French League and MLB teams started looking at the fan data to increase their revenue by saving marketing and other operational budgets through proper analytics based decisions and finding out the various pattern to increase the sales. Also, teams use the help of analytics to improve the fan engagement and real-time game experience.

Let's start with English Premier League,

Manchester City

Manchester city has tied up with SAP to increase fan engagement and better matchday experiences. As part of driving engagement, analytics helped them to provide fans with behind the scenes player statistics, and real-time game insights,etc.,Analytics used to produce more powerful reports to evaluate how the club is connecting with its fans and partners.

Fan Relationship Management - Manchester City FC

Fan Analytics helped them to optimise teams operations while providing new opportunities to enhance fan experiences wherever they are- in-stadium, online, via mobile devices.

Fan relationship management helped MCFC to increase the average attendance to 47,000 fans per match and able to sell 85,000 "Clever Cards" (loyalty cards) during the launching year.

How big data gives premier league football clubs an edge?

Chelsea

Chelsea club heavily depended on Fan Analytics and relationship management to present fans better experiences along with building brand awareness. Chelsea one of the premier league clubs who use Big Data efficiently for the success of sports business.

Team collect the data and analyses to bring more sponsorship deals, new market penetration and much engagement apart from monetization context.

Chelsea uses Customer Relationship management system to interact

In-depth analysis on fans, helped them to launch new revenue services and open up partnerships with various brands.

Arsenal

Fan intelligence is a vital element that determines the success of sports business and helps to activate many deals. Arsenal bought statDNA, a US-based football data analytics company to do on-field sports performance analysis, in game preparation, in post-match analysis, and in gaining tactical insights.

Arsenal FC Case Study

Along with the on-field analysis, Arsenal also partnered with a CRM company to understand their fans and their preferences in-depth. Arsenal uses their fan intelligence for their sponsor brand marketing activations, creating a top notch on and off game fan experience and manage their marketing budgets effectively.

Arsenal used Fan Insights to sell more upper-class tickets and increased the ticket sales of their away games.

Emirates: 'CRM data key to £150m Arsenal deal'

French League - Paris Saint-Germain

Similar to EPL clubs, Paris Saint-Germain also used Fan insights to predict the club revenues through various streams and fan behaviour. They nailed down their fan data to know more about their fans behaviours and consumptions.

Case Study: Paris Saint-Germain Football Club Scores With CRM Strategy 

Like all other teams, club revenue came from ticket sales, merchandise, prize money and sponsorships etc., The last time PSG won a championship was on 1996, later their fans had nothing to feel great.

Using big data to create smart venues = happy fans

With the help of Fan Data, PSG managed to increase their fans in-stadia experiences, cross-selling, create new targeted campaigns, customer segments, measure fan satisfactions and etc.  Fan relationship management had given fans a whole lot of promotional discounts and benefits, at the same time club generated more marketing opportunities.


Major Baseball League - San Francisco Giants

Fan Relationship helped SFG also like other clubs in its operations. They were able to sell complete tickets in 140 games straightly. Though teams do a commendable work to deliver best experiences to fans, there is a decided difference with the help of Data and Insights.

In baseball, the small things and details which increase the fan experiences that brings fans back. It also supported the team's revenue production and efficient fan  monetization.

Data  and analytics become a valuable part of the sports business as it helps to run the business more efficiently, prove the value of their brands to potential partners, and to improve the monetization of fans in the global market.

All most all the top leagues and club's like Liverpool, Queens Park Rangers and etc started investing on various analytics and CRM tools to grab their fan data to increase the ROI through better fan experiences.

How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results?

Data and Analytics became the vital part of all business. We saw How Big Data and Analytics used for Data Driven Decision making. In this post, we look at “How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results? Before we get into details, it is important to understand a Fan and Fan Ecosystem?

Who is a Fan?

(Fan Definition: Wikipedia) A fan, or fanatic, sometimes also called an ardent follower or supporter, is a person who is enthusiastically devoted to something or somebody, such as a band, a sports team, a genre, a book, a movie or an entertainer. 

Fans express their passion or interest through certain behaviours like social interactions, wish to acquire objects, posting online, etc. So, understanding a fan in detail helps to communicate and engage with him well. 

Fan Ecosystem

Fan ecosystem is an environment that interconnects fans, their interactions, and any activities performed which related to the devotee.

What does really matters in a Fan ecosystem? 

For the success of any business, it is essential to understand their customers or fans voice, feelings and needs. Until brands are able to communicate with their fans by understanding them in detail, the sustainability is very low in the market even if there is a convincing value proposition.

So, how do we understand Fans better? The best practice is to listen to them, engage them and analyse. A Fan ecosystem basically includes three things, they are 

• Fan engagement
• Fan Relationship Management- Analytics
• Fan Activation (Monetization)

Business decision making depends on the results of the important strategy of social media called Engage, Analyze and Activate.

Fan Engagement

Engagement is nothing but Interacting (meaningful communication) with fans. At Present, engagement shrunk to social media updates or posts. Fans are needed to engage through all the mediums or channels they connect with a brand like social, ticketing, email, websites, shopping, direct and etc. 

Mass level engagement became meaningless and won't work anymore; Individualization is the new face of engagement which provides a unique experience to fans. Fan insight helps the customization of experiences by an understanding of likes, dislikes and behaviours.

Fan Relationship Management(FRM)

Fan relationship management is handling fans in individual level with the help of data analytics. As everything connected with digitalism, user leaves a footprint of whatever action they perform like shopping, transactions, search, visits, social media interactions (comment, share, posting.).

There is a clear saying now, "Facebook knows a person better than his/her best friend"

How does it possible? It is by analysing all the activities a person performs on Facebook which makes it easy to predict his behaviours. But Facebook does this analysis only with online data. What about offline activities? Fan relationship management is a solution that built over Fan Analytics, which collect and aggregate fan data from various online and offline and create a 360-degree view of fans with actionable insights to manage him better than ever. 

Fan Activation(Monetization)

        Fan activation is getting fans to do what you want them to do through a series of activation services with the objective of monetization. It is a multi-level process of converting a fan from unknown to an advocate fan. Activation enables brands to monetize fans through insights and predictive analytics.

How does Fan Analytics help in Decision Making Process?

At present, fans are in a disengaged state where most of the brands are depended on social media channels to stay in connected with them and it is done on the page level. Due to limited fan intelligence, brands and teams face hindrance in generating better results.

With the Help of Fan Analytics, brands would able to overcome their pain points and increase ROI.

Fan Analytics provides brands, an in-depth knowledge and 360-degree view of fans at an individual level. It drives better business decisions by effectively leveraging fan data and the resulting insights. 

Let’s now look at how does Fan intelligence helps in BDM,

1.   Higher Engagement Rate across all touch points

       Fan analytics helps brands/teams to understand fans likes, dislikes and behaviours based on their online and offline activities. Engagement is not something which has to be restricted with social media updates like I mentioned earlier. It is really important to engage fans through all the touch points because it increases the fan affinity and loyalty. Analytics helps to engage fans based on their preferences which basically increases the Response and conversion rates.

For example, sending a 10% movie discount coupon code after his purchase which induces him to book another or sending a thank you note directly to the fan by mentioning his name from the hero of that movie, etc.

2.     Loyalty management and rewards

Identification and managing of loyal fans help to increase the brand value and revenue. How do we find our loyal fans? Loyal fans are the not only group of people who continuously interact with your social media pages but also people who support your team endlessly purchasing tickets, watching the match on TV or stadiums, attending offline events, interacting through Fan contests, subscribing to email campaigns, etc.

Fan intelligence helps to find loyal fans by analyzing millions of data from various places and identify various patterns to convert them as advocate fans and increase the brand value. It also helps to activate these fans through cross selling and up selling.

3.      Fan Relationship Management

We know Fans are the biggest asset of any team or brand. Maintaining the relationship with fans are very much important for the success of any business as they are the largest group of revenue drivers and income deciders. FRM identifies the places where a fan is more active irrespective of channels, mediums- online or offline and enable teams/brands to connect with them based on their past and present activities and preferences.

FRM brings online and offline fans to one place and manage relationship. Individual fan insights help to cluster the fans, create and target the campaigns and review the results and increase the ROI.

4.      Independent predictable value and value generation

It is now possible to calculate the individual monetary value a fan generates and predict how much he is valuable he is for the business with help of Fan intelligence. The value is calculated based on past transactions, spending nature, household income level, interest and behaviour. This intelligence helps brands to plan and execute their marketing and advertising campaigns in an optimised way.

With the help of Fan analytics, brands can now create more personalised offers to monetize them better with the higher response and conversion rates.

5. Measurable and Optimized Marketing Management

Technology and digitalism help brands to measure anything that is executed. Most of the times,the measurement and optimisation on

the campaign level. Now it is passed the campaign level and analytics is performed on an individual level with the help of Fan Insights. 

Most of the brands fail to make profit because they fail to gather the advance insights that separate success from the fail.  Marketers and Brands are doing marketing activities based on brand level based on objectives and goals rather than understanding the fans. The goal is to understand the fans by walking into their shoes and generating creative ideas from those learnings and insights to take decisions that eventually take business to profit margin.

6.      Alignment of sponsor brands with fan persona's and demographics

Selling sponsorships or getting a sponsor for an event or team became very hard as there are no specific metrics for proper measurement and sponsorship value can calculate the % of sales gone up during that particular period. However, there are no mechanisms yet to find out whether the sponsor brand aligns with fans affinity. 

For example, let us say 70% of fans of a team “X” are using low-end hand phones and shows interest in mobiles and technology. So, team X can easily sell sponsorship to a mobile brand. Because the market opportunity to sell more mobiles are higher by associating with team “X” rather than sponsoring any other Team.

Fan intelligence enables sponsorship sales based on insights and drives better results. So, it is important to look at the advanced level fan insights from the team fan base like fan affinity, likes/dislikes, age group and gender with household income level, etc.

 

In short, Fan Analytics is a Fan based analytic driven approach that helps teams and brands to take better decisions with the help of advance level of Fan insights. Individual level insights make business people to make more result oriented decisions by not only generating money but also saving the extra cash that spent for marketing, sales or anything as well.

PS: My next blog showcases Real world Analytic implementations that helped sports business to achieve the Goals.

Big Data and Analytics for Better Data Driven Decision Making

Big Data and Analytics are the two most used buzzwords of 21st century. Data Analytics helps to understand things in detail and how something works. Use of analytics help to increase productivity, make better data driven decisions, and gain an advantage on competitors and market activities.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is the most overused and misused buzzword in the digital age. Big Data has various definitions according to the context it represent. For example, in business Big Data means Data Analytics but in technological terms it is a data set that is too big to be processed.

Big Data is a term used to represent extremely large data sets with unstructured, semi-structured and structured data that has the potential to mined for information, trends and patterns, especial relating to human behavior and interactions. 

Why is it Valuable?

Big Data is the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity. Success depends on measurement and understanding of something and it helps to improve the business and return on investment. 

Data is easily available from various touch points like Social(Facebook,twitter, Instagram..), email campaigns, websites, ticketing, merchandising, mobile app usage, etc; proper measurement and analysis helps to optimize the business performance by generating better financial results. It could be either for Saving the money by optimizing the existing process or making more money by understanding the new opportunities.

Analytics and Big Data

We will start with understanding the difference between Analytics and Big Data.

Form Wikipedia, "Analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data". Analytics is built on the foundations of Statistics, Probability, Computer programs and operational research.

Analytics is the method used to find the meaningful information, trend and patterns from the large data sets and it can performed only if data is available. In simple, big data is useless if no proper analytics is performed.

Data can be captured from multiple touch points where a customer is connected with brands. It can then be analysed to make conclusions and patterns for deriving data driven decisions based on business objectives.

What are the Challenges in integrating Analytics into Business Decision Making?

The biggest challenges are setting up strategy, tools and technology and right talent to create business value.

Integration and Implementation of Analytics

Mapping out an analytics plan is difficult by creating the right strategy's based on analytics for business development and decision making. Also, the right people who understand the data and business to generate better results and value. 

What is working or not?

The other biggest challenge to find out what is working or not? Understanding the business in detail is critical for the success. 

It is important to find out what is working or not to improve the business, it depends on marketing, competition, operations, location and decisions etc. Data alone never shows what is working or not, but need analytics to find out how various categories of business can be improved.

Data Scientist is a new job role which is evolved as a result of these challenges. It combines the skill sets of business management, consultant, analyst and a programmer.

How to use Data and Analytics in Business Decision Making?

Big data calls for data driven decision making. Analytics can be used for decision making only if there is clear and present need,question,challenge.Until there is no crisp and clear statement or objective, analytics driven decision making is useless. 

Analytics is used in decision making based on the applicability of Analytics Frame work. Though data analytics used for Decision making process, the right decision has to taken and implement by business analysts or managers because data is just an element that make the BDM process more easier. 

At times, the data driven decisions can go wrong, only through the continuous analysis and understanding of the scenario bring out the better data driven results.

"Data will always helps to improve the performance but data alone never sufficient to show the best outcome in the biggest market"

Big Data and Analytics are the core part of any business decision making process as it helps to understand Needs, opportunities, performance, challenges and results. It can drive better outcomes by using the quantitative and qualitative methods. 

PS: Next blog is about how does "fan analytics" disrupt the business decision making. And, how does the implementation of Fan Analytics in the Sports and Entertainment Industry helped brands monetizing their Fans in a better way.