Good business owners are always looking for ways to improve and grow their business. It used to be that entrepreneurs had to rely on observation and sales; but technology has brought in an entire world of data analytics that puts all sorts of helpful information at our fingertips. Whether you are looking to understand your sales patterns, better analyze your target market, or identify your risk assessment, data analytics can help you. Read on to learn more:
How Does it Work?
Data Analytics is a way of looking at all the raw data you’ve collected concerning your business and potential consumer and making sense of it. By pinpointing all the relevant information and breaking it down into facts that you can use, you can better target how you make decisions on everything from inventory and budget forecasts to pinpointing demographics for marketing. In short, it helps you to optimize your business’s performance.
Who Does the Analysis?
Most business owners don’t have the time or resources to perform a thorough collection and analysis of their business’s data, so hiring an outside consultant makes the most sense. Wasting money on advertising and marketing to the wrong audience, or creating products that are not relevant to the current spending models, can add up to far more than the cost of paying a qualified and experienced business professional to analyze and deliver the information to you.
Analyzing Your Market
In order to manage your business effectively, for it to grow and succeed, you need to market it well, which means developing a marketing plan. A good plan will rely on data collected regarding target audience, product demand, customer demographics, purchasing habits, and sales trends. Marketing data can help you determine pricing, how to offer targeted sales and promotions, and give you a way to quantify success.
Analyzing Your Customer
The kind of data analytics you obtain can help you with aspects of your business beyond just sales and marketing too. Hearing from and learning about customer experiences can improve the overall relationship between you and your current and potential customer base. Understanding who your customer is, what their expectations are, and what they desire is invaluable for any business that wishes to expand their outreach and retain their current customers.
Analyzing Your Inventory
Examining trends in sales over the previous years and months can help you manage inventory. By analyzing past sales, you can predict future demand. Having too much inventory can result in large amounts of waste, and having too little can mean disappointing customers with delays or cancellations. Having a detailed review of past sales and an informed view of future potential needs is the kind of information that can keep your business operating efficiently and cost-effectively.
Analyzing Product Development
For product development, data analytics can inform you as to who is buying your product and how they’re using it. Producing a new product means a lot of trial and error, but with a thorough analysis of how a product is expected to perform, a lot of the guesswork is taken out of it.
Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics, or SMA, collects data from user experiences within social media groups and blogs and evaluates it to help businesses more directly target their potential buyer. The results are usually available immediately so you can gauge how your campaign is performing and make adjustments on the go. There are free tools you can download to help you use and manage your SMA to make targeted ad purchases.
You can also take advantage of online file conversion tools to convert a PDF to JPG format so that you can pull images from documents you already have. Social media is very image-driven, and PDFs are not factored into SEO (search engine optimization), so JPG is the better option. These tools allow you to easily extract images from a file or convert entire pages into images for easy posting.
For an extra boost, a website banner is a great way to build brand awareness and attract new visitors to your social media pages and website. DIY tools make it easy to create custom banners you can change out regularly. You can use website banners to promote special offers, highlight new products or services, or simply showcase your brand.
Analyzing Your Risk
As Marketplace Risk says, “swiftly spotting future threats and finding ways to safeguard your company is critical.” With risks from cyber threats increasing, knowing your risks and how to overcome them can help stop fraudulent activity before it happens rather than the more costly exercise of cleaning up after an event has occurred. Identifying financial and market risks so you can avoid them is also something that can help you with obtaining investors or bank loans.
Using Your Data for Success
As a business owner, there are two things you can never have too much of: money and information. While data analytics isn’t going to tell you how to make your money, it will provide you with the information to make your business more streamlined, efficient, and profitable. Use what you learn to make strategic choices about your inventory and marketing, and take advantage of free tools to reach your target market.