Data analytics – Why The Hype?
‘Data analysis’ has become a popular buzzword in business. It’s essentially taking a huge amount of data and using it to better run a company. Before computers, such data would have been inaccessible and too big to calculate. Now a machine can scan millions of pieces of data in a split-second. In the world of marketing, this has lots of potentials. Market research can now be made more precise and be done much quicker. Here are just a few ways to use data analysis within your business and, why is the hype?
You can identify your target audience
Every business has a target audience in mind. But, finding the most likely business leads requires a bit of data analysis. For example, if your company has a website, you may be able to install a Google Analytics plug-in that allows you to see who exactly is visiting your website, at what time and how they’re getting there.
From here you can create more focused marketing campaigns. You may find a certain age group is worth targeting that is visiting at a certain time (you could focus sales calls or social media posts around this time). You may find people are visiting from a certain site in which case placing ads on this site or coming up with some kind of cross-promotion strategy could be possible. It may even be something as simple as identifying a blog post that was popular and writing something similar in order to get even more visitors.
If people can pay through your site, you may even be able to tell who your real leads are. You may be getting lots of visitors on a Monday. But, people may only be buying your product later on in the week. Making this the time to promote.
You can optimise loyalty
Your long-running customers are as important as your new customers. Encouraging loyalty and preventing customers from shopping elsewhere can be done through analytics as this post How Analytics Is Transforming Customer Loyalty Programs shows. Having a loyalty card could be a way of putting this into action. If you work in a coffee shop, you could study data metrics to see who uses their loyalty card the most and what their favorite drinks are. Offering deals with these drinks could keep your loyal customers happy and be a way of promoting other products.
You can improve your software performance
It’s important that any software that you’re using in your business is free of bugs and working as quickly as it can. As this article ASP.NET Performance Monitoring: A Developer’s How To Guide showcases, there are ways of using analytics to fine-tune this software. If you’ve created a marketing app or piece of software for your company, you may be able to make it more user-friendly. So, that more people are tempted to use it. Bugs and lagging will make you lose customers. Be able to constantly monitor your software will allow you to iron these out quickly and keep customer retention high.
You can cut your expenses
Analytics software can also help you to more evenly distribute your business’s funds. This is more of a finance than a marketing use, but often the two can be interlinked.
Analytics, for example, can come in use with ordering stock. Rather than simply ordering stock as it runs out, you may be able to use analytics to look for other trends too. Certain products may sell better in winter or at the beginning of each month when people have more money. This could allow you to order to more and less stock when you need it. Preventing wastage if this involves food and drink products.
Analysing data on all aspects of your business’s expenses could allow you to effectively trim costs from cutting down energy to consumption to lowering your insurance rates. Marketing analytics meanwhile might allow you to focus campaigns on certain times of the day to get the most profit. Such as, holding sales calls at a certain time of the day or cutting back on marketing expenses from your website to focus on social media. You’ll find all kinds of accounting software that may be able to help in this area.
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