Techblog
6 ways even small businesses can benefit from data analytics
Big-budget enterprises aren't the only ones that can benefit from data analytics. Here we discuss 6 ways small businesses can improve decision-making and sharpen their competitive edge with data.
You’ve likely heard how data analytics is taking the business world by storm. Advanced analytics are enabling enterprises to gain deeper insights into their business, which help improve processes and efficiency.
But there's no need to budget for building costly tools. Thanks to the proliferation of analytics online, today's small businesses can analyse data on customers, sales and more, using free and in-built analytics. The key is to understand your business objectives clearly, which will then dictate the type of data that needs to be tracked. Here's how you can get started.
- Develop target personas to hone advertising
One of the most cost-effective types of data small businesses can obtain is first-party data related to customers. First-party data is data which can collect this directly from buyers for free through online surveys and feedback forms, or by tracking interaction through methods such as card transactions.
How is this data useful?
This data is particularly useful in creating customer personas to market to customers more effecively. These are character profiles that represent your ideal buyer and include not only demographic information, such as age and income, but also interests, concerns and reasons for purchasing products. You can then speak in a voice they relate to and be informed about the best platforms to advertise on to reach them.
- Optimise your website for conversion
The next type of data you should explore is traffic to your website. Start with free tools like Google Analytics to analyse traffic, or an easier option such as website packages that include analytics.
Most companies analyse web traffic to understand how customers use their site, paying attention to user preferences on the site - like page views on textual versus visual content, long form content versus short blogs, time spent on forms and checkout pages as well as any navigational issues such as buttons that aren’t visible enough.
How is this data useful?
These insights are used to improve the design of the website to increase its usability and accessibility for customers. They also help to optimise the site for conversion, which means turning more visitors into customers. For example, returning visitors are more prone to convert than new visitors, so you can track this site metric and work to improve it.
- Fuel sales with personalised recommendations
Web traffic also could provide metrics on the number of repeat visitors to your site. Tracking this metric over time and complementing with other traffic numbers like time spent on a product page and checkout pages will give businesses key insights into their loyal and high-value leads.
How is this data useful?
Aside from growing a loyal audience and generating leads, this data can also be used to create personalised product recommendations for repeat visitors through cookie-based retargeting and thereby stimulate sales.
Amazon is renowned in online retail for using algorithms to personalise its store for each customer. Today, personalisation is highly sophisticated and widely used by retailers like Junique, which employs real-time personalisation, making recommendations and optimising landing pages and content for customers.
- Plan your next store
Next you can leverage customer location data, which is information networks provide about the geographic location of your customers' devices. This type of data is used in location intelligence to help companies identify cost savings and boost revenue.
How is this data useful?
For example, you can use location intelligence to plan new stores near customer hotspots. Or like Domino’s Pizza, use location intelligence to provide targeted communications, informing customers about changes to stores near them.
- Boost brand recognition
Then there’s data from your social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Almost all of your customer interactions on these platforms, such as likes, retweets, emoticon expressions and comments, can be crunched by social analytics to measure the overall effectiveness of your social media strategy.
How is this data useful?
You can then use these insights to craft a better strategy geared to boost brand recognition – create higher impact posts, multiply followers and convert them into customers.
- Improve products
You can also mine social media for consumer opinion, known as sentiment analysis. These analytics combine natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics. They track customer sentiment based on positive and negative references about your business and products online.
How is this data useful?
Sentiment analysis is especially useful to help improve products and services. You can use the insights to identify popular versions, drill down to see which customer demographic likes certain features and evaluate the success of new launches.
Data analytics promises big opportunities for small businesses. With numerous data sources online, it’s never been easier to leverage analytics to improve business processes. You will be able to:
- Build better personas.
- Optimise your website for conversion.
- Personalise site recommendations.
- Plan your next store.
- Increase brand recognition.
- Improve products.
To get started, you simply need to consider which types of data you can obtain and how you can use it to help achieve your business goals.