Technology has changed the way businesses operate and the increasing use of data is yet another way in which tech is revolutionising industries. Now that companies can process and analyse Big Data, there are even more opportunities to gain useful insights and make data-driven decisions.
Whether you’re launching your own start-up or managing a global enterprise, data should play a major role in shaping your operations. To find out why take a look at these five reasons to use analytics to run your business:
1. Optimise Customer Journeys
Due to the varied use of technology, customer journeys are more personalised than ever before. One customer may engage with your brand on social media before making a purchase via a landing page, for example, whereas another may find your site via a Google search and engage with a branded chatbot before signing up to your email newsletters.
With so many different touchpoints available, delivering an omnichannel customer experience is essential. Of course, this also increases the amount of data that’s available to your business. By collating this data and using business analytics to make sense of it, you can generate useful insights that tell you more about your customers. In turn, this information can be used to create more seamless omnichannel experiences and enhance the customer journey.
2. Acquire More Customers
Customer acquisition is, perhaps, the most obvious way to scale your business. If you want to secure a larger share of the market and increase your revenue, acquiring more customers will certainly help you to achieve this goal.
Of course, every business wants to secure more customers, so there’s plenty of competition when it comes to building a loyal customer base. When you can offer an enhanced customer experience, it helps you to outperform your competitors and increase your sales. Furthermore, using analytics to track user touchpoints and identify where potential customers are dropping out of the sales funnel enables you to take preventative action. As a result, you can propel more users through the sales funnel and turn prospects into customers.
3. Get to Know Your Target Audience
Every business needs to know its target audience in order to adequately cater to its needs and wants. If your product or service is designed to solve a problem, for example, it’s vital to identify common pain points, so that you can resolve them. Similarly, if you want to become a go-to industry brand, you’ll need to know what elements of the customer journey are most important to your target audience and what they expect from their brand interactions.
Fortunately, analytics gives you the tools and information you need in order to get to know your target audience better than ever before. When you can see exactly how many times a user visits your site, what content they’re interested in and how they engage with your brand, you can align them to a buyer persona and enhance their journey accordingly.
Similarly, using analytics on a wider scale enables you to access more information about your target audience as a whole. By doing so, you can gain deeper insights into what your audience wants and needs, which will enable you to provide just that.
4. Increase Personalisation
A personalised customer experience isn’t just advantageous; in today’s digital landscape, it’s essential. Whether your goal is to acquire customers, increase sales or optimise customer requisition rates, increased personalisation can help you to achieve your objectives.
Personalisation allows you to customise a user’s experience and deliver content that’s tailormade for them. Prospects are far more likely to engage with content that’s directly relevant to them, which means personalisation can increase brand engagement and optimise your conversion rate.
From personalised email marketing to product suggestions and retargeted advertising, there are a variety of ways you can use personalisation to optimise customer journeys and enhance your company’s profitability.
5. Predict the Future
In broad terms, there are three types of analytics that businesses routinely use: descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive. Descriptive analytics focuses on using historical data to identify patterns, while prescriptive analytics enables you to test various scenarios to determine which one offers the best results. With predictive analytics, however, you can use statistics to estimate what future outcomes will be.
As you might expect predictive analytics can be extremely valuable to businesses. When you can use analytics to predict future trends and patterns in customer behaviour, you can cater to them accordingly. This gives you the opportunity to create more meaningful interactions with your target audience and to deliver more value to your customers. In doing so, you’ll be able to acquire more customers and optimise your retention rate, thus achieving increased commercial success.
Incorporating Analytics into Your Operations
With so many benefits associated with analytics, every business should be actively seeking out ways to incorporate data analysis and applications into its operations. From start-ups and SMEs to national and global enterprises, every commercial organisation can leverage the power of data to increase its success.
However, being able to collect, collate, analyse, and apply data requires skill and expertise. If you want to unleash the power of data analytics, it’s vital to enhance your knowledge and expand your skillset. With an online MSc in Business Analytics from Aston University, for example, you can learn how to use business analytics to optimise your company’s performance.
When to Use Business Analytics
As you begin to experience the impact of analytics, you’ll see just how widely data can be applied. From creating successful marketing strategies and conducting market research to developing growth plans and scaling your business, there are endless ways you can use analytics to enhance outcomes. Savvy companies are even using analytics to enhance employee engagement and boost in-house efficiency, which highlights just how effective a data-driven approach can be.
When you incorporate data into every business decision, you have the opportunity to use verifiable and quantifiable insights when determining the best course of action. As a result, you can use business analytics to enhance outcomes and achieve financial, commercial, and reputational success.