Analytics is one of the most useful tools in a business’s arsenal. Any business that is ready to accept it has a huge amount of information available for them to use and data is one of the most crucial assets that any company can possess. Data provides you with a real opportunity to drive change and bring about positive outcomes that propel your business’s development and success.
Being grounded in solid data is crucial for any business decision that you make. Without data, decisions are often less informed and you’re more likely to find yourself wondering if you made the right choice. Data analytics can be put to use to generate key insights and allow you to make the right choices to best serve both your organization and its customers.
Data analytics can tell you a lot about the overall health and situation of your company. They will provide you with a very clear idea as to whether you are on track to achieve business objectives and goals, what’s going on in your business currently, and whether or not you need to make any changes in order to help it thrive.
And, it’s never been easier for businesses to obtain pertinent data. You can easily embed tools on your website to collect visitor data, and data is automatically collected from your social media profiles. Automated data collection and analysis tools allow you to generate reports on your dashboard in real-time, making it easier for you to make the best business decisions on the fly.
So, why is data analytics so important for modern businesses, and what benefits does it have for your company?
It Facilitates Realistic Goal Setting:
Setting the right business goals is important for success. But it’s important to be realistic about what your business is going to be able to achieve in a certain timeframe. There’s no point in setting a goal to make a million dollars in profit by this time next year if you are barely breaking even right now; it’s very unlikely to happen.
When you’re lacking the correct information, setting goals for your business is going to be pure guesswork, which often ends up with a business having goals that are constantly shifting as you realize that you might have reached too high or too low. Keeping goals consistent and stable is where business analytics come into play.
Analytics helps you set better, more realistic goals for your business by:
- Assembling data from previous activities and historic trends
- Providing you with a clearer picture of which goals to set right from the beginning
- Making sure that any opportunities for business growth and expansion are not missed
- Making it clear to see when a certain goal isn’t possible, or when you can reach higher
It Supports Better Decision Making:
Past experience and even your gut feeling are always valuable tools to use when you are making an important decision, but you can’t rely on them alone when you are making choices that affect your business, employees, and customers.
The best decision-makers in business know just how important it is to involve data in the decision-making process. You simply won’t get the results that you want and will run the risk of making the wrong choice if you don’t make data a key part of the process when making decisions regarding factors such as:
- Pricing strategies
- Inventory management
- Hiring and staffing
- Marketing
- Customer service
For example, using data to drive decisions regarding your marketing campaigns allows you to look back on historic trends to figure out what has worked and what’s not gone so well in the past. You can use this data to put together a campaign that involves all the past strategies that have yielded you good results so far, improving your chance of launching a marketing campaign that really gets results.
On the other hand, remove data from the equation, and you’re left guessing or trying to remember what’s worked well in the past, which leaves you wide open to making mistakes. You can even use actionable data when hiring new employees; it can make it easier for you to determine how many new hires your business needs to take on, and where they are best deployed.
Statistics show that businesses that utilize data in their decision-making processes tend to report making better, more successful choices. Incorporating data analytics into every business decision that you make reduces risks while improving efficiency and boosting profits.
At Emerson College, for example, you can enroll in an online degree program that you can fit around your work. Visit their website to find out more about studying data analytics for marketing and how it can also be applied to other aspects of your business.
You Can Find Your Ideal Target Audience:
Identifying your ideal target audience is crucial, especially in the infancy stage of a business. Getting the customer base wrong means that you could have a fantastic product or service with lots of potential, but you’re not getting any results because you’re putting it out there in front of the completely wrong people.
Thankfully, there are several options for utilizing analytics to identify your ideal audience, and you can do this throughout every stage of your business to ensure that you are still targeting the right customers, or whether it would make more sense to shift to a different audience.
You can use data from social media and your existing customers as very useful information to help you determine your ideal customer, and examine your competitors’ customer base, to determine which kinds of people are interested in the types of products or services that you offer. There’s a variety of tools that you can use to easily gather data audience data, such as:
- Google analytics
- Facebook analytics
- KISSmetrics
- Mint
- CrazyEgg
- Church Analytics
Using analytics to study your audience means that you can gather rich, insightful information that will help you learn more about your customers and put together better marketing and customer service campaigns to improve your brand’s relationship with them. Once you have defined your ideal target customers, it becomes easier to provide tailored solutions and content to keep them interested in your brand.
You Can Create Mass Personalization:
Data analytics tools enable you to segment your audience and create mass personalization; one of the most useful ways to reach your customers and create a strong relationship between them and your brand. Analytics tools are available to help you divide your audience into distinct groups, which could be based on factors such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Income bracket
- Social situation
- Location
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Career
Once you have done this, you can implement tools that automatically, effectively create personalized marketing email content, targeting huge groups of people yet simultaneously creating personalization, boosting your company’s reach, encouraging more of your recipients to engage with the content that you send them and, most importantly, boosting the impact that you have and increasing conversions.
Personalization is a very powerful tool, especially in marketing, where over 70% of professionals state that targeted personalization is the best way to drive customer engagement and see results.
But there’s much more to personalization than simply addressing customers by name instead of saying ‘dear customer’; you need to take the time to learn about your audience and their individual traits and the only way that you can effectively do this is by gathering and analyzing data. Using data to drive your marketing efforts provides you with a way to ensure that you are providing relevant, interesting experiences across the entire customer purchase journey for each customer that you serve.
It Helps You Get Better Results From Social Media:
Social media was first invented to help people stay connected to one another, but today, it has become one of the most powerful tools out there for helping brands and their customers stay connected, too. You can utilize social media sites like:
- Snapchat
Leveraging these social networks gives you a chance to not only advertise your brand and the products or services that you provide to your target audience all in one place but also find out more about your ideal customer and really get to know them.
And, there is a range of analytics tools that provide an in-depth look at what’s being said about your brand online, allowing you to monitor social media and stay in the know about whether your brand is being mentioned in good or not-so-good conversations. An easy way to do this is by tracking hashtags and mentions on social media.
In addition, social networks themselves also provide analytics tools that you can use to determine the effectiveness of any ad campaigns you have on their platform. You can use these tools to get data on where your audience is coming from, their interests, the devices they are using, and how much interest they have shown in your ad, in order to drive better social media marketing decisions for the future.
Data is crucial to any business decision that you make, improving marketing, customer service, business growth, and many other aspects of running a successful company.
Interesting related articles: