Today, a business can get more information to help them run successfully than ever before. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations don’t use this data to their advantage. Let’s go over a few ways that this can be fixed for the betterment of your business’ operations.
First, What Qualifies as “Data?”
Generally speaking, the data that businesses collect can be sorted into four different categories. These categories are:
- 1. Personal Data – This category is composed of all the data that can be used to help identify your prospects and clients. This includes both personally identifiable information and details like the devices used, IP addresses, and such.
- 2. Engagement Data – How do your prospects and clients interact with your business and brand? This data helps describe just this, charting the response that your website, social media, advertising, and other efforts to communicate receive.
- 3. Behavioral Data – When your clients, customers, and prospects do interact with your business, how is it that they typically do so? Including datasets like purchase histories and even mouse movements while navigating your website, this form of data seeks to answer this question.
- 4. Attitudinal Data – This form of data helps to measure the response that your business’ products and services elicit in your audience. How satisfied are they after completing a transaction? How much interest is there in your product offering?
What Does Data Do for a Business?
There are various ways that the data you collect during your normal operations can be put to use:
Data Gives You Insights into Your Customers and Clients
Today, it is critical that your business has some perspective into how your clientele thinks, what they are most interested in, and what they are really looking for in your business. First of all, who are your clients, and from there, how can you most effectively fulfill their needs and communicate these capabilities with them? Are your current efforts actually returning an acceptable return on your investments? The better you know your audience, the more equipped you will be for success.
Data Helps You Measure Internal Performance
Let’s say that Employee A and Employee B spend their time making widgets. By collecting and compiling various data points, you can help determine where your business’ internal strengths and weaknesses lie.
Perhaps Employee A’s output far outpaces that of Employee B. While this is important data to consider, it can easily tell an incomplete story. Maybe Employee A produces more widgets, but a much higher proportion of theirs don’t pass your quality control checks, whereas Employee B’s consistently do. Alternatively, Employee A may have logged more training on the widget-making machines, whereas Employee B seems to have specialized more in producing doodads. Having this level of insight into your processes gives you the ammunition needed to make the most of them.
Data Allows You to Finesse Your Processes
On a related note, collecting data throughout your processes can help you to identify points in your business’ procedures that can have their costs—both in terms of finances and time—more optimized to your business’ interests. Take your business’ marketing, for instance. Data that measures your return on investment, particularly combined with how much of an investment has been made, can tell you if your different activities are worthwhile. Or, perhaps a process that your business follows has a tendency to go over budget or miss deadlines. Collecting data throughout this process can help you to identify the points where issues arise and thereby give you the opportunity to adjust your process to avoid these hangups.
This is Just the Start of Data’s Value
We can help businesses around North Central Massachusetts make the most use of their data as possible. Give North Central Technologies a call at 978-798-6805 to learn more today.
