You’re a small business owner. You’re great at collecting data. It’s easy for you (Go you!) You have a business that your customers trust and they willing hand it over. But you’ve been so good at collecting it, now you have this giant pile of it, and it’s daunting. You may be thinking “What do I do with all this data?” “Is this data judging me for not using it properly?” “Does my data hate me?!?” – Relax. As the title of this blog should have tipped you off to … it doesn’t. Data is your friend.
You may have read here and everywhere that good analytics leads to good decisions. But learning how to analyze your data, and make it actionable, is the secret formula. Looking for indicators in all that customer demographic data, user behaviors, site traffic, payment info, etc is your next step.
Or maybe your data needs a boost? What the bigger competitors may be doing, to get a leg up, is appending their data with data that they haven’t collected themselves but can be bought to enhance what they already have. Knowing your prospects and your customers outside of their 1:1 relationship with you can help you personalize your communications with them and offer them the right offers at the right times on the right devices. Your new super-charged data can also help you find new customers by tracking your current customers’ social media interactions and targeting tangential, to your business, websites that you may not have been considering.
But just when you thought you knew all there was to know about your data, your data reveals another side to you. Beside helping you win, upsell, and retain business your data can also help you improve your processes and course correct any potential pain points within your organization. Data data helps you cut past emotional or anecdotal distractions to see performance honestly. The sports world is a great reminder of that. Employees performance metrics (their “numbers”) are literally on display all the time for everyone to see. There’s no hiding from it. They are constantly reminded of the need to produce.
In the last few years, every professional sports team has made an investment in data analysts/scientists. They know that this additional resource makes them smarter, and makes their money work more efficiently across all lines of business, cascading down dividends that boost their margins every step of the way.
So, hopefully we’ve established that you need not be afraid of your data. It’s here to help. It wants to help you by telling you who your customers are, what they probably are going to buy next, and the best way to get their attention. It’s also going to make you look in the mirror and tell you which advertising efforts are working and which are not. – The truth is, the longer you don’t embrace these ideas the longer you’re playing with one hand tied behind your back. The good news is that advances in data processing and visualizations, along with more agency, provider, and tool solutions than ever before, have made all of this easier than ever.
At Stirista we understand that data can be complex, but we’ll continue to sit at the intersection of offline and digital and make it simple for our partners. We’ll onboard and activate your data efficiently so you can grow relationships with existing customers and find new ones. With the industry’s most complete identity spine, our own DSP, and attribution across the whole marketing funnel we deliver the simplicity and results you expect.
