Whether you are the proud owner of an established business or you are just beginning your journey with a startup, you will want to know how to use data to grow your company. The first step is to become more data-literate, so you can spot patterns and use data to improve your business decisions.
We will talk about how to gather different kinds of data, for instance by conducting customer surveys, tracking product sales, monitoring site traffic, reading social media comments and monitoring marketing strategies, and how each of these approaches can be used to grow a business. Finally, we will look at streamlining processes and coming up with smarter business solutions with data.
Become More Data-Literate
It is very important that businesses are able to gather, store, organize and analyze data about their customers, sales, and marketing efforts so they can make better business decisions. Professional consulting services for data governance can help businesses comply with general data protection regulations (GDPR) and any other privacy acts, while still gathering valuable data and employing advanced analytics. With the right support in gathering and managing data, companies can make necessary changes in areas that do not work and improve areas that do work in order to grow.
When your company can properly track and monitor things like site traffic and conversions, sales, and social media engagement with your content, you can identify which marketing techniques are working. This will allow you to make better business decisions and improve your return on investment (ROI) for marketing.
Conduct Customer Surveys
A great way to gather qualitative data, that is information that comes in the form of opinions and testimonies, is to conduct customer surveys. You can ask customers to fill in online forms or answer questions after visiting your premises about their overall feelings of satisfaction. Moreover, ask for opinions on your products or services, such as favorite elements, things that do not work, appealing features, things they would like to see your company do, and so on.
Then, you can organize this data and spot patterns. If the overall impression is that you have a product that is definitely not working or a marketing strategy that is particularly appealing, listen to your target audience and use this information to improve customer satisfaction and minimize unnecessary spending on things that do not work.
Read Social Media Posts and Comments
Another great way to gather information about customer satisfaction and gauge your company’s online reputation and brand awareness are to use social media. Make sure you invest in social media advertisements so you can track engagement with your content. You can read comments and search for mentions of your company on Twitter and Facebook. Take note of what people are saying and use this to your advantage.
Track Product Sales
Moving away from qualitative data, your business can also benefit hugely from knowing how to use quantitative data, that is numbers and figures. An obvious place to start is with sales numbers. You should be able to identify your best-selling and worst-selling products or services, keeping in mind seasonal patterns.
If you find that you have some products or services that perform poorly, you can take them back to the drawing board to re-design them or discontinue them. Use the sales numbers in conjunction with the surveys and social media comments to determine which items are unpopular and why. This will allow you to save money on products that do not work and create something that your target audience has a demand for instead.
Monitor Site Traffic
You should also pay close attention to your website traffic. Note which of your marketing techniques seem to be effective in getting potential customers to visit your site and which leads to conversions. You should be employing marketing techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO), which involves backlinks and social media ads.
Your marketing team can look at traffic data to establish which techniques provide the best ROI and lead to customers taking action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter. Then, you can put more effort into those marketing techniques that lead to more quality traffic to your site.
In order to grow your business, you will have to ensure that your site is optimized for increased traffic. You can do this by ensuring all data on the site is up-to-date, using a reliable and scalable web host, and providing alternative payment methods.
Streamline Processes
Businesses can streamline processes with master data management (MDM). This is when several different data sets are all stored in one repository. For instance, a retail company can keep its customer data, sales numbers, and product information all in one place. This makes it much easier for businesses to retrieve and analyze data and make insights based on all of the information.
Smarter Business Solutions
Finally, companies can use the information they glean from their well-managed data to come up with smarter business solutions. This means they can create more efficient processes and systems to deal with any business issues.
Smarter business solutions might improve payroll, marketing, auditing, market research, or any number of other processes that a company relies on. With the right information about what works and what does not, and all necessary figures stored effectively in data sets, these areas of business can be made much more efficient.
This has been a brief guide to growing your business with data. We have discussed the importance of companies being data literate, as this is the key to spotting patterns and making better business decisions. Moreover, we looked at various different ways that companies can gather useful data, such as with surveys and product sales figures, and how these data sets can be used to grow the business.
Finally, we have seen that with the right data management, companies can streamline processes and come up with smarter business solutions. Hopefully, this guide has made you realize just how important it is for businesses to understand, gather and analyze data properly in order to grow.