With such a wealth of data available at everyone's fingertips, it can often become pretty overwhelming when it comes to deciding exactly what to do with it. In this article, we aim to explore the ever-advancing technological world of stats and figures, and help bring it all together in a way that makes a little more sense.
In short; the line between business and data is blurring, and this means data is becoming more and more integral to the running of almost every business. Just think of how much data is being stored about you on a daily basis; you can barely blink at Google without it recommending you a fancy new eyelash curler to make those blinks extra fabulous.
For most companies, data is mostly important in terms of driving operational excellence, or fostering far better customer-client relations. But the more data-savvy among businesses understand that it runs far deeper.
In almost all cases, data-driven decision-making takes precedent over gut-feeling or business experience - when it’s done properly. These days, there’s a wealth of data available at your fingertips - from Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools to Facebook, Twitter and everything in-between. But it’s not quite as simple as grabbing all the data and metrics you can find and hoping there’ll be some secret code to sudden business growth hidden amongst the numbers.
Step 1: Strategise
First, you need to decide exactly what you want to glean from the data. Are you looking for new leads? Trying to boost your business visibility? Maybe you’re just trying to work out what processes are working and what aren’t. Either way, working out exactly what you want to learn is perhaps the most important step.
Step 2: Identify
Once you’ve worked out exactly what you want to achieve, it’s important to identify the key areas in which data is flowing into your business. It can be anything, from customer interactions, to clicks on your social media posts, or engagement with your paid media ads. Of course, these will change depending on what your business entails; but the data is still equally as important.
Step 3: Collect & Analyse
Now it’s time to bring all the data together to work out exactly what insights the data reveals. Look at the why and how, as opposed to simply the what - meaning you can make an informed, tactical decision.
It's important to note that many businesses will already collect a multitude of data - whether they know it or not - but won't actually have the means to aggregate it together, or indeed draw any meaningful conclusions from it. As such, it's a problem we as a business are often employed to deal with. But, it's not something that requires you to undergo weeks of data analysis training and learning to use a cookie-cutter reporting package that might not make sense for your business.
Far from it, in fact. It's largely a case of us designing a simple system that stitches all of your stats and figures together into reports tailored to your exact requirements, that will then help you understand and visualise your data more easily.
In Conclusion
Choosing the right data-driven strategy is crucial to getting the most out of your data. If you know what you’re looking for, data can provide endless opportunities for fine-tuning and improving your business processes; from front-end sales & marketing to the more internal systems.
And, it can work for any business. It’s not just industry giants like Amazon & Google that can harness the power of data effectively - even Joe’s Coffee Shop down the road could benefit from a little targeted data analysis. Should he market his brand new mocha-choca-latte-cino on Twitter, Facebook, or by distributing some local leaflets? Does his high-spending hipster clientele prefer the orange-peel-pumpkin-spiced vanilla latte or the classic Americano? Now that would make an interesting case-study; but I think we know the results.
Data is our specialty. We bring technological know-how with a business-first mind, allowing us to focus on the operations and processes that require data to make the right decision. As such, any business can benefit from expert data analysis. Get in touch with us to see how we can help.