One of the primary aims of a business is to understand its customer so that profit margins can increase. However, this isn’t always easy. There are a lot of useful techniques out there to put the word out to your customer about upcoming product lines and any other media you would like to share. Implementing data analytics will allow you to take masses of raw data and find trends that can be used to inform decision making. Further, a lot of the analytics can be carried out by computers now and worked into an automated system. That’s a conversation for another time though, so let’s have a look at how data analytics can impact your business.
In its simplest form, data analytics is the examination of datasets. Businesses use data analytics to inform decisions. For example, let’s say you have a website that sells trainers – when you bring out a new product line, you may direct your advertising strategies to people who bought the previous design. Then, you collect data about your current demographic and realise that the majority of people that bought your trainers are university students. So, you alter your advertisement strategy and aim it at university students. The use of data analytics can be really helpful if it’s done right.
Data analytics can be very overwhelming and three’s a lot to learn. So, to bring the biggest impact to your business, why not consider studying a distance learning masters in business analytics programme and develop your skills? By making sure that you are well trained, you will be able to utilise data analytics to make the biggest impact.
Data analytics is fantastic, as you will learn, but it costs a pretty penny to store all of the data. In order to maintain technology and update it regularly, your business will have to hire dedicated data science staff – if you don’t have an onboard team, then you could be falling behind your competitors. One effective way of reducing the cost of storing data is to consider virtualising data on a cloud platform, and bill it internally.
As a business, without using data analytics, a lot of your marketing strategy will rely on guesswork because the truth is that human beings aren’t anywhere near as capable of taking a bunch of numbers and drawing up trends. With an efficient data analytics tool, you can get your marketing strategy geared towards your customers right from the get-go. Knowing your customer thoroughly will allow you to meet the needs of your customers. Further, as the customer market can change rapidly, data analytic systems will constantly search for new trends to make sure that you come out on top.
Now that you can fully understand your customers, you can direct more marketing to them. Instead of waiting around for weeks or months to see if your campaign was effective, with data analytics, you will be able to see real-time data so that you can measure your marketing metrics and make better-informed decisions that you ever could have before.
Search engine optimisation is something that most businesses should be doing anyway. Data analytics can help you delve deeper by giving you insights into which combination of words will have the biggest impact. It can help you to identify referral sources of converting traffic, dead links and sources with unusual traffic. Being able to get behind the scenes more efficiently means that you can create SEO content that will hit hard and have more of the desired effect. Furthermore, with data analytics, you can streamline your SEO process across all of your marketing teams so that you’re all working towards one shared goal.
As well as improving your SEO content, you can use social media data analytics to see which of your posts are gathering the most views and positive attention across all of your platforms. You could find out that more people view your Instagram than any other platform, so you would target your marketing more towards Instagram – rather than wasting your time barking up the wrong tree.
This might be a given, but now that you’ve used data analytics to get the most useful insights into your customers’ needs, your entire business will be able to offer tailored customer service based on readily available information. For example, your business sells computer products and a customer calls up in need of a new laptop – you can pull up data analytics based on the customer’s spending habits and interaction. You might find out that they are avid gamers. This means you can tailor your sales towards devices that favour gaming – your sale is more likely to succeed, it will take less time, and the customer will be really happy.
As we live in a world where everyone is concerned about their data privacy, and with the introduction of GDPR, as great as data analytics is, the collected information needs to be stored in a secure space. One thing that could prove effective, once you have a storage solution, is to make your plan available to customers: let them know how long their data will be stored, how long for, and whether it will be shared with any third parties. This will heighten customer trust and strengthen your businesses connection.
As you can see, data analytics is a massive area of expertise and this article barely touches the tip of the iceberg. However, it does offer you some very basic starting points for you to go and carry out further research, and undertake further education so that you can implement data analytic systems into your business. Although the initial process will be long, and at times it may seem laborious, the overall outcome will be more than worth the effort when your business soars over the competition with ease.
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