(ThyBlackMan.com) Businesses have always relied on some sort of data to be successful and to help make better decisions. Data collection goes back to the time when it involved a lot of effort to get it; it used to require manual data collection such as talking with customers face-to-face or taking surveys via phone, mail, or in-person. Whatever the method, the data had to be collected manually for businesses to understand their customers and market better. Because of the financial cost, time, difficulty of execution, and more associated with data collection, many companies operated with limited data.
Today, gathering data to help you better understand your customers and markets is easy, the challenge is having so much of it that you have to sift through it to find which is the most important and what matters most to you as now, almost every modern business platform or tool can deliver rows upon rows of data for your business to use.
Having a wealth of data doesn’t mean that you can predict the future. However, it’s pretty close. Businesses can use data to find new customers, increase customer retention, improve customer service, better manage marketing efforts, track social media interaction, and predict sales trends. In any business today, there are plenty of tools available to help you gather data, so it’s essential that you are using the right ones and making the most of what is available to you. Your tech needs to be up to date, you need the right software, and your business processes need to be as efficient as possible so that you’re collecting the data in the best way possible and then using it effectively too. From effectively managing an sd-wan to generate valuable data and insights to avoid losing business to competitors due to poor network performance and user experience to using survey monkey with your clients and customers, there are many ways you can collect this data. Having this much information also doesn’t make your business decisions for you, you still have to do that, but data can be beneficial in the running of your business and is a fantastic tool to have when it comes to making those decisions. With that in mind, here are a few significant ways using data that can benefit any company.
Data Helps You Make Better Decisions
Any business with a website, any business on social media, or any business that accepts electronic payments is collecting some form of data about customers, their user experience, and web traffic, to name a few. All the data is filled with potential, but you just need to learn how to access it and how to use it to improve your company.
Think about your company now, what is it that helps you or influences the decisions you make? Do you rely on what you see happening in your company? What you see or read in the news? Or do you follow your gut? All of these things can be helpful when making decisions, but it is far more powerful to make decisions which are backed by actual numbers and information? Data gives you a profit-increasing power that you can’t afford to miss.
Data can help you with almost any decision in your business, think about how you order for your business, how do you restock your inventory? Do you order based on what you think is selling well? Or do you order based off what you know is in short supply after an inventory check? Data helps leaders make smarter decisions about where to take their companies.
Data is changing the way we do business. You should use data points and statistics in the marketing content you create, as this gives the appearance of authority and credibility. However, you don’t have to use someone else’s data; you could be the business that other businesses cite in their content. You can gather market data easily with tools like Google’s Consumer Surveys and SurveyMonkey, and then you can package your results in a neat format for distribution, and you will soon see your industry presence grow.
Data Helps You Solve Problems
If you’ve had a slow sales month or recently finished a poor-performing marketing campaign, how can you pinpoint what went wrong or was not as successful? Trying to find the reason for underperformance without data is almost impossible so tracking and reviewing data from business processes can help you work out where performance breakdowns happened so you can better understand each part of the process and know which steps need to be optimized and which are performing well. Google Analytics can survey your clients’ behaviour and can help you to gain insight into what they don’t understand what they like and what they don’t like. Using tools like this, you can see where clients get stuck on your site, which means that you can use that information to create a more user-friendly experience.
Data Helps You See Performance
Have you ever wondered how your team, department, company, marketing efforts, customer service, shipping, or other parts of your company are doing? Collecting and reviewing data can show you the performance of all this and more. If you’re not sure about the performance of employees or your marketing, how will you know if your money is being put to good use? Or if it’s bringing in more money than you spend? Perhaps you have heard that Facebook is one of the best places to advertise, so you decide to spend a large amount of your budget on Facebook ads and a minimal amount on Instagram ads. However, if you were reviewing the data, you would see that your Facebook ads don’t convert well at all compared to the industry standard. By looking at more numbers, you would be able to see that your Instagram ads are performing much better than expected, but you’ve been pouring the majority of your advertising budget into Facebook and underutilizing Instagram. Data gives you clarity so you can achieve better marketing results.
Data Helps You Improve Processes
Data helps you understand and improve business processes so you can reduce wasted money and time. Every company feels the effects of waste as it uses up resources that could be better spent on other things. It takes up people’s time and ultimately impacts your bottom line.
Where data can show you how different marketing channels are performing, you can see which offer the greatest ROI and make sure that you focus on those. Or you can have a look into why other channels are not performing as well and work to improve their performance. This means that your money can generate more leads without you having to increase your advertising spend.
Data Helps You Understand Consumers And The Market
Without data, how do you know who your actual customers are? Without data, how do you know if consumers like your products or if your marketing efforts are practical? Without data, how do you know how much money you are making or spending? Data is key to understanding your customers and the market. The clearer you see your consumers, the easier it is to reach them. However, it can be easy to get lost in data if you don’t have the right tools to help you understand it. Data enables you to know which of your products are currently hot items on the market. Knowing a product is in demand allows you to increase the inventory of that item to meet the demand. Not knowing that info could cause you to miss out on significant profits. Similarly, knowing you sell more items with Facebook than with Instagram helps you understand who your actual buyers are.
Emails, social media posts, online articles, GPS signals, fitness tracking and simple website browsing all produce a lot of data which you can use to benefit your company and your sales. However, don’t forget that this collection of data also helps your customers and the service they receive. For example, their preferences, the recommendations for the things they might like and even what they see advertised on the websites we are on. The amount of data collected and the contents of that data are of interest to many sectors such as tourism, commerce, advertising, genetics, astronomy or human resources and in the future, Big Data will likely be used in the medical industry to create new treatments and more personalized medicine; it will probably be used in the humanitarian field, and be used to manage natural disasters and manage the consequences of wars. Big Data will also, of course, be used for commercial purposes as it is now, such as targeting the best of customers for advertisers or offering better promotional offers, it could even be used for predictive shopping.
Today, running your business with the help of data is the new standard. If you’re not using data to guide your business into the future, you will become a business of the past. Fortunately, the advances in data processing and visualization make growing your business with data easier to do.
Staff Writer; Doug Harris