Local Search and Internet Yellow Pages - A Whole New Vocabulary for Small Businesss

Buyers want both online and local information about where to buy Most small businesses are local in nature, serving people who live nearby. Their customers found them through traditional methods like the Yellow Pages or newspaper ads. So far, the Internet hasn't figured prominently in their marketing efforts. That's about to change, as Local Search methods become more widespread.

Even for buyers expecting to spend their money close to home, more and more of them go to the Internet to locate desired products and services. They rely on search engines to find suitable vendors in the fastest, easiest way. Local Search combines the search query word or phrase with specific geographic terms, like city or zip code. That way, search results only include enterprises in that local area.

Instead of information about a small enterprise being lost among millions of pages of search results, it shows up in a small pool of local providers. That's good for them, as well as the person looking for what they provide.

Small operations can easily be located by a whole new group of buyers Consumers don't simply go to the Yellow Pages when ready to buy - as they once did. Studies show that an astonishing 36% of online searches are conducted to find local businesses. About a quarter of all Internet users already conduct local searches. They'd do even more of it, if the desired small business data were more complete.

Local enterprises need to prepare for the impact of changing customer habits. An easy first step is to include your business in Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), along with the printed Yellow Page directory. That puts your enterprise on the radar screen.

You'll find reliable advice from experts in Yellow Pages and Local Search so you can get more mileage from your promotional dollars. Start by getting comfortable with search concepts, and improve your odds of being found when people search online for what you offer. You don't even need your own Web site to benefit from Internet Yellow Pages and Local Search.

Learn the Relevant Terms

Search Engine - method for locating the information available on the Internet; a program that searches Web pages for requested keywords, then returns a list of documents where the query terms were found Google and Yahoo, the major general search engines, have both shifted gears to make Local Search a priority when delivering relevant results.

Spider (also called "crawler" or "bot") - goes to every page on every Web site and reads the information so it can be available to searchers; to "crawl" a site it collects and indexes information from it

Specialized Search Engines - narrow focus of information crawled and indexed, like medical, business, or shopping sites

Keywords - word or phrases used by search engines to locate relevant Web pages; words chosen to improve a site's search engine placement and ranking

Search Query - search request, which the search engine compares to the spidered entries, then returns results to the searcher

Search Results - compiled list of Web pages that a search engine delivers in response to a query; the number of items returned is usually overwhelming (in the millions), so searchers only bother to view results on the first pages

Relevant Results - the test of a good search is whether the results obtained relate to what the person wanted to find, without a lot of irrelevant links

Local Search - combining a geographic term in a search query to locate suitable providers in a specific area

Pay per Click (PPC) - method of building traffic whereby site owners bid on search terms (keywords) that link to their site

Geographic Terms - specific information about the local area that can be included in a local search: zip code, town, county, geographic region, state

Top Ranking - sites shown on the first page(s) of search results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - fine-tuning keywords and page content so the Web site rates high in search engine results

Tags and Titles (on Web Pages) - provide site keywords and information to search engine spiders for indexing a site

Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) - directory of business phone numbers and locations in a geographic area, organized by category; searchable data base accessed on the Internet. Learn how your business can make the most of Local Search 

Make your business easy for searchers to find

The public is embracing the convenience of searching on the Internet to find information about local businesses.

However, their searches for desired information are compromised because so many local enterprises don't show up in the databases as yet. Those that do have an edge in their local market. Climb aboard! Make sure searchers can find you. For little or no money, you can expose your enterprise to the whole world.

Whether or not your business has a Web site, you need to provide the information people are looking for in the places that they look for it. Local Search and Internet Yellow Pages open new avenues to buyers ready to spend. Best of all, they support and compliment your traditional methods of finding new business. So you cover all your bases. (c) 2007, Lynella Grant

Dr. Lynella Grant Author, Yellow Page Smarts - Smarter and more effective ways to attract more YP customers in the Directory and on the internet

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Local-Search-and-Internet-Yellow-Pages---A-Whole-New-Vocabulary-for-Small-Businesss&id=1894

Media, the Internet, Yellow Pages, and Your Business

If you are reading this article, chances are you could use a little extra money. With the advent of the internet and the migration of advertising dollars from print to electronic (and this time, it's the real thing, I swear! Not one of those 1999 tech busts!...Seriously!) If you own a small business today, you look at many advertising mediums. The majority of these mediums lump themselves into 2 categories, creative or direct.

Creative has always been the crapshoot for the small business owner. A sales rep walks into your business, espousing the greater good of television or radio advertising, quickly moves past the ratings, viewers etc and into the sexiness of hearing your name at 6:57am Monday, Thursday and Saturday if you are watching station X or listening to station Y. If this product didn't work, a Super Bowl commercial price tag wouldn't make headlines every December (for how much Geico paid) or late February (to hear which is most memorable). The key with creative is frequency. If you have realistic budget for frequency, you can make the phone ring with a creative campaign. If you have that budget you probably aren't reading this article. Realistically speaking, you don't have a ton of money to risk on creative advertising effectiveness, haven't backed it up with a call to action, and you need, pound for pound, the least amount of advertising money possible, with the most phone calls...

Enter direct advertising. Classified sections in newspapers, they make your phone ring, if you're selling something people want. (For the record, advertising in the sports section of your local paper is creative advertising (people don't go to page 5 of the sports to regularly check out the latest prices on used cars.) Classified advertising is in the process of going from the newspaper industry's cash cow to taking it on the chin from EBay (ever heard of it?) and even more attractive small town slugger, Craigslist (you go Craig!). If you're business pumps out used cars by the pound, chances are you, or your salesmen are using these two websites to start realizing savings from Rupert Murdoch and his yacht-owning cronies. Even the best of EBay or Craigslist, however, doesn't put much of a dent in your P&L statement if you are service based like a contractor, or general retail, like a bookstore.

Enter the yellow pages...Pound for pound, no other medium makes the phone ring at your business like the good old fashioned yellow pages. Throw down your money, and answer the phone. You already know that. So do all the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers in the country. The best protected advertising budget in any small business is the yellow page budget. Yellow pages are the scourge of the other guys. How many radio sales reps will walk into your store after you started your advertising campaign and say, "Tom, your $1,000 invested with my station this week got you 48 phone calls?" (If you find a station like that please send me the phone number, and I retract everything I said earlier) When someone wants a plumber, a pool boy, a new pool, or a divorce attorney for getting the new pool without his wife's approval, they pick up the weathered old yellow pages, leaf through a few adverts, and call someone that sells what they need.

So, am I telling you to advertise in the yellow pages?,,, Not so fast Skippy...First, let's look at the cost of the yellow pages,...You want the phone to ring in Miami, and you're a plumber? Better be ready to pony up some serious cash...say $3-4k per month. In Miami, the average cost of a service call could be around $65. If you don't have a crew, that ad needs to generate 61 calls to break even, not including the employee cost, travel costs etc. Not so bad? How many calls did you need to generate those 61 service calls? Did you go see everyone that called you? I would guess, for a contractor, you might get lucky and have a 50% close rate...122 calls...to break even. Don't forget to pay yourself...200 calls. Depressed? Better be glad you don't sell shoes. The same ad would generate a much lower close rate, and you need to sell an dump truck of shoes every month!

What's my point? Enter the ELECTRONIC yellow pages...No print bill, real time changes, and guess where all those print yellow pages are putting their money these days? BellSouth and SBC just paid $100M (you know, $100,000,000) for a new domain name, and combined their "competing" forces to make a better entry in the fray, thinking that you might remember yellowpages.com better than smartpages.com or realpages.com. (Makes you wonder where Google fits into the old branding and name recognition game.) Verizon seemed to get the concept a little better with superpages.com by aligning with Mr. Gates over at MSN right around the time Al Gore was inventing the internet. Getting back to the point, the internet yellow pages are going to do to print yellow pages what EBay and Craigslist have done to the newspaper companies. No paper, no ink, usage climbing (for electronic yellow pages, usage is climbing to as high as 70% of online searching, and buying) and real-time, do-it-yourself advertising. Advents such as community ranking, mini-sites, toolbars, pay per click, pay per call, and just about every way possible to pay for performance, track performance, and see what other buyers of your goods or services thought of your business. Due to the ever changing, "who's in first place" of the internet, there has yet to be determined if there is a Lance Armstrong in this race. Our own company USdirectory.com, via its partnerships, and investment into technology, is looking to become a late entry, blue-ribbon bearer. At this point, it's too early to clearly point out which one, or all, or none, of these companies will do to yellow pages what Google did to global search. That being said, even Google doesn't reflect enough tenure to ensure its own top position.

Who wins?? You do, the business owner. Technology is about to reduce your advertising budget the way Southwest and JetBlue changed the airline industry. Your customer base, as they migrate to the internet as vehicle of choice, will reach you at lower price points, and in greater volume, then ever before. Your mission, should you choose to accept, in investing in the right mix, at the right point, and try to cater not only to your existing radius of business, but around the planet with new and specialized niches...but that's another story.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Media,-the-Internet,-Yellow-Pages,-and-Your-Business&id=56566

Combine Your Yellow Page Ad and Web Site for Maximum Profits

A Yellow Page Ad isn't Enough Any More

An unquestioned "must" for any small business has been to run an ad in the Yellow Page Directory. Since most customers were local, that was enough to establish itself as "open for business." The annual Yellow Page ad represents the largest promotional expense for many enterprises. Yet, Yellow Page directory use is declining, while expanding segments of the public don't rely on them at all. Yellow Page advertising costs keep going up, and the complicated pricing structure is difficult to figure out. Worse yet, having a Yellow Page ad doesn't deliver like it used to.

People can find most of the information they want without ever opening a directory. Your business needs its Yellow Page strategy to be in tune with the times and your market. Like most business owners, you must squeeze maximum value from every promotional dollar spent. That requires you to move beyond treating a Yellow Page ad like it's a separate, stand-alone way to promote your business. It's not.

Your Yellow Page advertising needs to work in tandem with all the rest of the efforts you pursue. The Internet Expands Your Arena Every business needs to put itself in front of the people looking for what it does - and that's not just through the Yellow Pages any longer.

An increasing percentage of customers, who spend their money close to home, are Internet savvy. There's a major overlap between Yellow Page directory users and Internet users. That fact supports integrating your local and Internet promotional methods so they attract more new customers. Yellow Page users are likely to be Internet users as well. And a business that ignores online activities entirely may have a tough time getting access to or credibility with those customers. It is possible to make online and traditional (off-line) methods to attract customers work in tandem - improving the effectiveness of each alone.

So it's no longer an either-or, all-or-none choice whether to promote the business online or off. People who subscribe to online services consult the Yellow Pages 23% more often than non-subscribers.

Frequent Yellow Page Users are:

- 18% more likely than average to be Internet subscribers

- 32% more likely to be among the heaviest Internet users

- 18% more likely to make purchases on the Internet

- 27% more likely to spend more than $1,000 on Internet purchases

Source: Simmons

Customer Behavior is Changing

More and more, people are going to the Internet to find, learn about, or select products and services. Even local ones. That doesn't mean that they will buy online, however. People still prefer to spend their money locally when they can. But, even the smallest business can do a better job of being found by those who prefer to use both the Internet and the Yellow Page directory to make their buying decisions. And, it can be done very inexpensively, too. Even a 100% local business can pull in more business by getting its low-tech and high-tech advertising to mesh.

What Else has Changed?

- Buyers are less trusting and more willing to shop around

- Customers have more options and ways to find what they want

- Availability of Internet Yellow Pages

- Aging population uses the Yellow Pages differently than young people

- Development of unique niches and specialties

- More choices for a "better deal"

- More directories competing in a geographic area

- More immigrants, or those from other cultures, unaccustomed to Yellow Page use

- Area code proliferation fragments cities

- Larger cities have multiple directories, rather than one large one

- Development of specialized directories - like ethnic, non-English, women, minority, business to business

Become Visible Online - With or Without Your Own Web Site

If your business already has a Web site, treat it as a way to expand the reach of your Yellow Page ad and traditional marketing activities. Jettison the expectation that it should make sales - few do so. But an information-packed Web site can support your traditional marketing methods very well.

Even without your own Web site, your small business can establish an online identity that helps buyers to find you.

- Get listed in a variety of Internet Yellow Page (IYP) directories

- Send emails to your "regulars" with special offers and useful information

- Position yourself for Local Search - a method whereby customers use search engines to locate local businesses by town, state, region, zip code, etc.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Combine-Your-Yellow-Page-Ad-and-Web-Site-for-Maximum-Profits&id=1816

Stand Apart From the Rest - Yellow Page Advertising and the Internet For Small Businesses

A lot of people use the Yellow Pages when looking for information about local businesses. That is why, one of the tried and tested small local business advertising tips is Yellow Page Advertising. Why? When a consumer references the Yellow Pages, it means he is ready to buy, will most likely call, and will buy at the place stated in the Yellow Page ad.

But a new trend is growing that can not be ignored: local searches in the Internet. Computer savvy consumers go to the Internet to look for products and services, with a high percentage of searches on specific localities. What about Yellow Page users? Studies conducted show that frequent Yellow Page users are likely to be Internet subscribers and heavy Internet users. And part of their online activities includes purchases via the Internet that sometimes amount to $1,000. A business that disregards online activities may do well to think again.

The convenience of online searching for local products and services is gaining acceptance. However, search results are not as comprehensive as the desired information for local businesses. Many small local businesses do not have online presence. Searching for specific services in a given locale is still done by referencing the yellow pages, as proven by the 13.4 billion Yellow Page references in 2006. After referencing the Yellow Pages, some consumers then turn to the Internet to check if the company has a website.

Who doesn't want a growing customer base? You can capture both Yellow Page users and Internet subscribers and users attention. Make online and offline methods of advertising work together. Make sure consumers find you whatever their method of searching is: online or offline. Cover all your bases. Yellow Page advertising for lawyers, doctors, and other professionals in a given locale may be effective. But having online presence in databases will give that edge over competitors in the local market. It increases your visibility and chances of being found by the people who need your services.

Put together search engine marketing, local search and yellow page advertising whatever your services are, e.g. marketing for personal injury lawyers, etc., will make you stand out not only in your locality, but also worldwide.

Marketing from the heart specializes in lawyer marketing and yellow page advertising for law firms.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Stand-Apart-From-the-Rest---Yellow-Page-Advertising-and-the-Internet-For-Small-Businesses&id=2177150

How to Generate Sales Leads Using Web Scraping Services

The first stage of any selling process is what is popularly known as “lead generation”. This phase is what most businesses place at the apex of their sales concerns. It is a driving force that governs decision-making at its highest levels, and influences business strategy and planning. If you are about to embark on an outbound sales campaign and are in the process of looking for leads, you would acknowledge the fact that lead generation process is of extreme importance for any business.

Different lead generation techniques have been used over and over again by companies around the world to satiate this growing business need. Newer, more innovative methods have also emerged to help marketers in this process. One such method of lead generation that is fast catching on, and is poised to play a big role for businesses in the coming years, is web scraping. With web scraping, you can easily get access to multiple relevant and highly customized leads – a perfect starting point for any marketing, promotional or sales campaign.

The prominence of Web Scraping in overall marketing strategy

At present, levels of competition have risen sky high for most businesses. For success, lead generation and gaining insight about customer behavior and preferences is an essential business requirement. Web scraping is the process of scraping or mining the internet for information. Different tools and techniques can be used to harvest information from multiple internet sources based on relevance, and the structured and organized in a way that makes sense to your business. Companies that provide web scraping services essentially use web scrapers to generate a targeted lead database that your company can then integrate into its marketing and sales strategies and plans.

The actual process of web scraping involves creating scraping scripts or algorithms which crawl the web for information based on certain preset parameters and options. The scraping process can be customized and tuned towards finding the kind of data that your business needs. The script can extract data from websites automatically, collate and put together a meaningful collection of leads for business development.

Lead Generation Basics

At a very high level, any person who has the resources and the intent to purchase your product or service qualifies as a lead. In the present scenario, you need to go far deeper than that. Marketers need to observe behavior patterns and purchasing trends to ensure that a particular person qualifies as a lead. If you have a group of people you are targeting, you need to decide who the viable leads will be, acquire their contact information and store it in a database for further action.

List buying used to be a popular way to get leads, but their efficacy has dwindled over time. Web scraping is the fast coming up as a feasible lead generation technique, allowing you to find highly focused and targeted leads in short amounts of time. All you need is a service provider that would carry out the data mining necessary for lead generation, and you end up with a list of actionable leads that you can try selling to.

How Web Scraping makes a substantial difference
With web scraping, you can extract valuable predictive information from websites. Web scraping facilitates high quality data collection and allows you to structure marketing and sales campaigns better. To drive sales and maximize revenue, you need strong, viable leads. To facilitate this, you need critical data which encompasses customer behavior, contact details, buying patterns and trends, willingness and ability to spend resources, and a myriad of other aspects critical to ascertain the potential of an entity as a rewarding lead. Data mining through web scraping can be a great way to get to these factors and identifying the leads that would make a difference for your business.

web-scraping-service

Crawling through many different web locales using different techniques, web scraping services pick up a wealth of information. This highly relevant and specialized information instantly provides your business with actionable leads. Furthermore, this exercise allows you to fine-tune your data management processes, make more accurate and reliable predictions and projections, arrive at more effective, strategic and marketing decisions and customize your workflow and business development to better suit the current market.

The Process and the Tools

Lead generation, being one of the most important processes for any business, can prove to be an expensive proposition if not handled strategically. Companies spend large amounts of their resources acquiring viable leads they can sell to. With web scraping, you can dramatically cut down the costs involved in lead generation and take your business forward with speed and efficiency. Here are some of the time-tested web scraping tools which can come in handy for lead generation –

•    Website download software – Used to copy entire websites to local storage. All website pages are downloaded and the hierarchy of navigation and internal links preserve. The stored pages can then be viewed and scoured for information at any later time.     Web scraper – Tools that crawl through bulk information on the internet, extracting specific, relevant data using a set of pre-defined parameters.

•    Data grabber – Sifts through websites and databases fast and extracts all the information, which can be sorted and classified later.

•    Text extractor – Can be used to scrape multiple websites or locations for acquiring text content from websites and web documents. It can mine data from a variety of text file formats and platforms.

With these tools, web scraping services scrape websites for lead generation and provide your business with a set of strong, actionable leads that can make a difference.

Covering all Bases

The strength of web scraping and web crawling lies in the fact that it covers all the necessary bases when it comes to lead generation. Data is harvested, structured, categorized and organized in such a way that businesses can easily use the data provided for their sales leads. As discussed earlier, cold and detached lists no longer provide you with enough actionable leads. You need to look at various factors and consider them during your lead generation efforts –

•    Contact details of the prospect

•    Purchasing power and purchasing history of the prospect

•    Past purchasing trends, willingness to purchase and history of buying preferences of the prospect

•    Social markers that are indicative of behavioral patterns

•    Commercial and business markers that are indicative of behavioral patterns

•    Transactional details

•    Other factors including age, gender, demography, social circles, language and interests

All these factors need to be taken into account and considered in detail if you have to ensure whether a lead is viable and actionable, or not. With web scraping you can get enough data about every single prospect, connect all the data collected with the help of onboarding, and ascertain with conviction whether a particular prospect will be viable for your business.

Let us take a look at how web scraping addresses these different factors –

1. Scraping website’s

During the scraping process, all websites where a particular prospect has some participation are crawled for data. Seemingly disjointed data can be made into a sensible unit by the use of onboarding- linking user activities with their online entities with the help of user IDs. Documents can be scanned for participation. E-commerce portals can be scanned to find comments and ratings a prospect might have delivered to certain products. Service providers’ websites can be scraped to find if the prospect has given a testimonial to any particular service. All these details can then be accumulated into a meaningful data collection that is indicative of the purchasing power and intent of the prospect, along with important data about buying preferences and tastes.

2. Social scraping

According to a study, most internet users spend upwards of two hours every day on social networks. Therefore, scraping social networks is a great way to explore prospects in detail. Initially, you can get important identification markers like names, addresses, contact numbers and email addresses. Further, social networks can also supply information about age, gender, demography and language choices. From this basic starting point, further details can be added by scraping social activity over long periods of time and looking for activities which indicate purchasing preferences, trends and interests. This exercise provides highly relevant and targeted information about prospects can be constructively used while designing sales campaigns.

Check out How to use Twitter data for your business

3. Transaction scraping
Through the scraping of transactions, you get a clear idea about the purchasing power of prospects. If you are looking for certain income groups or leads that invest in certain market sectors or during certain specific periods of time, transaction scraping is the best way to harvest meaningful information. This also helps you with competition analysis and provides you with pointers to fine-tune your marketing and sales strategies.

get-results-from-your-lead-generation-campaign

Using these varied lead generation techniques and finding the right balance and combination is key to securing the right leads for your business. Overall, signing up for web scraping services can be a make or break factor for your business going forward. With a steady supply of valuable leads, you can supercharge your sales, maximize returns and craft the perfect marketing maneuvers to take your business to an altogether new dimension.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-to-generate-sales-leads-using-web-scraping-services/

Professional Web Scraping Process

Web scraping is usually regarded as data mining and knowledge discovery. It is the process of extracting useful data and relationships from any data sources. For instance the web pages, databases and search engines. It employs pattern matching and statistical techniques. It is important to note that web scraping does not borrow from other fields like machine learning, databases, data visualization and others but supports such fields.

Web scraping process is such a complex process that requires not only time but also people with expertise in the same field. This is because the internet is such a dynamic resource that changes every time. For instance the data you can extract from a certain website a month ago will not be the same one you will extract now. The changing of data in short period of time poses the difficult of relying to such data and therefore calls for web scraping process. The web scraping process should be performed regularly in order to obtain accurate data that can be relied upon.

It is important to understand that many areas of business, science and other environments use a large amount of data. This data needs to be meaningful and knowledge in its application. Web scraping sometimes may be overlooked, but in essence it can provide very useful information than the statistical methods can produce. The web scraping methods are vital as they give you more control over the data.

Usually the data found on the internet is noisy data. This implies of the advertisements and pop-ups. The data also found on the internet can be described as dynamic data, sparse data, static data, heterogeneity and so and so forth. Such problems occur in very large amounts and therefore call for web scraping professional companies to perform their job. With such problems it is important to realize that statistical methods would never succeed and therefore calls for web scraping.

Process of web scraping

1. Identification of data sources and selection of target data. You need not to harvest any kind of data, but data that is deemed relevant and useful in its application. The relevance can be seen in a way of getting the data that will benefit your company. This is an important step in the web scraping process.

2. Pre-process.This involves cleaning and attributes selection of data before it is being harvested. Web scraping is usually done on specific websites that are relevant to your business. For instance if you have an online store and need information about your competitors products then you need data from other websites that are relevant such e-commerce stores and so on.

3. Web scraping. This involves data mining so as to extract models and information patterns or models that is beneficial to your business.

4. Post-process. After web scraping is done, it is important to identify the useful data that can be used in your business in decision making and so on.

It is important to note that the patterns identified need to be novel, understandable, potentially viable and valid for web scraping process to make sense in business data harvesting.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/professional-web-scraping-process/

6 Benefits Associated with Data Mining

Data has been used from time immemorial by various companies to manage their operations.Data is needed by various organizations strategically aimed at expanding their business operations, reduction of costs, improve their marketing force and above all improve profitability. Data mining is aimed at the creation of information assets and uses them to leverage their objectives.

In this article, we discuss some of the common questions asked about the data mining technology. Some of the questions we have addressed include:

•    How can we define data mining?
•    How can data mining affect my organization?
•    How can my business get started with data mining?

Data Mining Defined

Data mining can be regarded as a new concept in the enterprise decision support system, usually abbreviated as DSS. It does more than complementing and interlocking with the DSS capabilities that may involve reporting and query. It can also be used in on-line analytical processing (OLAP), traditional statistical analysis and data visualization. The technology comes up with tables, graphs and reports of the past business history.

We may define data mining as modeling of hidden patterns and discovering data from large volumes of data.It is important to note that data mining is very different from other retrospective technologies because it involves the creation of models. By using this technology, the user can discover patterns and use them to build models without even understanding what you are after. It gives explanation why the past events happened and even predicting what is likely to happen.

Some of the information technologies that can be linked to data mining include neural networks, fuzzy logic, rule induction and genetic algorithms. In this article we do not cover those technologies but focus on how data mining can be used to meet your business needs and you can translate the solutions thereafter into dollars.

Setting Your Business Solutions and Profits

One of the common questions asked about this technology is; what role can data mining play for my organization? At the start of this article we described some of the opportunities that can be associated with the use of data. Some of those benefits include cost reduction, business expansion, sales and marketing and profitability. In the following paragraphs we look into some of the situations where companies have used data mining to their advantage.

Business Expansion

Equity Financial Limited wanted to expand their customer base and also attract new customers. They used the Loan Check offer to meet their objectives. Initiating the loan, a customer had to go to any branch of Equity branch and just cash the loan. Equity introduced a $6000 LoanCheck by just mailing the promotion to their existing customers. The equity database was able to track about 400 characteristics of every customer. The characteristics were about loan history of the customer, their active credit cards, current balance on the credit cards and if they could respond to the loan offer. Equity used data mining to shift through 400 customer features and also finding the significant ones. They used the data and build model based on the response to the Loan Check offer. They then integrated this model to 500,000 potential customers from credit bureau. They then selectively mailed the most potential customers that were determined by the data mining model.At the end of the process they were able to generate a tot
al of $2.1M in extra net income from 15,000 new customers.

Reduction of Operating Costs

Empire is one of the largest insurance companies in the country. In order to compete with other insurance companies, it has to offer quality services and at the same time reducing costs.Therefore it has to attack costs that may in form of fraud and abuse. This demands a considerable investigation skills and use of data management technology. The latter calls for data mining application that can profile every physician in their network based on claims records of every patient in their data warehouse. The application is able to detect subtle deviations on the physician behavior that are linked to her/her peer group. The deviations are then reported to the intelligence and fraud investigators as “suspicion index.” With this effort derived from data mining, the company was able to save $31M, $37M, and $41M in the first three years respectively from frauds.

Sales Effectiveness and Profitability

In this case we look into pharmaceutical sector. Their sales representatives have wide range of assortment tools they use in promoting various products to physicians. Some of the tools include product samples, clinical literature, dinner meetings, golf outings, teleconferences and many more. Therefore getting to know the promotions methods that are ideal for particular physician is of valuable importance and it is likely to cost the company a lot of dollars in sales call and thereby more lost revenue.

Through data mining, a drug maker was able to link eight months of promotional activity based on corresponding sales found in their database. They then used this information to build a predictive model for each physician.The model revealed that for the six promotional alternatives, only three had a significant impact. Then they used the knowledge found in the data mining models and thereby customizing the ROI.

Looking at those two case studies, then ask yourself, was data mining necessary?

Getting Started

All the cases presented above have revealed how data mining was used to yield results to the various businesses. Some of the results led to increased revenue and increased customer base. Others can be regarded as bottom-line improvements that impacted on cost savings and also improved productivity.In the next few paragraphs we try to answer the question; how can my company get started and start realizing the benefits of data mining.

The right time to start your data mining project is now. With the emergence of specialized data mining companies, starting the process has been simplified and the costs greatly reduced. Data mining project can offer important insights into the field and also aggregate the idea of creating a data warehouse.

In this article we have addressed some of the common questions regarding data mining, what are the benefits associated with the process and how a company can get started. Now, with this knowledge your company should start with a pilot project and then continue building a data mining capability in your company; to improve profitability, market your products more effectively, expand your business and also reduce costs.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/255-benefits-associated-with-data-mining/