Most if not all businesses gather data – often mountains of it on a daily basis – so it means organisations and businesses of all sizes are able to potentially learn much about their market and their customers through data analytics so as to enable them to make knowledge-based decisions of the type unimaginable before the IT boom.

That said, many businesses could likely improve their data gathering, storage and manipulation methods.

Understanding What Data Is Required

It’s all too easy to have data streaming almost minute by minute but it is being unformed and not serving the higher purpose, which is to give a business better insights so as to serve customers better and thus increase profits.

This isn’t just marketing and sales-driven data: improving profits also stems from increasing productivity, so certain data types can inform operational decisions and changes.

What Do You Want From Your Data?

Clarify your data needs: for example, rather than just saying ‘find out what our customers are buying’ perhaps ask ‘what’s a new customer’s order value?’ ‘When do they buy?’ ‘What brought them to our store or website?’

If you decide to run a product promotion or ongoing marketing campaign, what data do you wish to harvest from it over and above the basic ‘is this promotion or campaign successful’ based on a certain metric that signifies success or otherwise.

Knowing the type of data you wish to gather will inform your strategy for collecting it whether through boosting perhaps your POS (Point of Sale) operation so as to enhance data gathering at the point of purchase, or learning more about your potential customers through – for example – face to face interviews or online surveys.

Responses to your marketing efforts data may be gathered through social media monitoring for example.

Connecting Data Gathering With Data Analytics

Before embarking on your data gathering strategy, it’s essential to look at the data analysis aspect. If you’re working with a data analytics professional, they can bring a raft of analytics and data storage tools, facilities and expertise into play so their input on which effective data gathering methods to use will be invaluable once they understand what you wish to learn from it.

Gathering your data in the right form based on what you need to know from it combined with effective storage and data analytics puts a very powerful weapon at your disposal in meeting your objectives whether improving productivity, your marketing, your sales, customer relationships and engagement and much more.

Using Data Effectively

How an effective data strategy can boost your business:

• Understand your customer from their interest and buying habits
• Improve productivity through refinements to business operations
• More effective decision-making bases on hard facts
• Help you predict future trends through reliable data-based business intelligence
• Data led market intelligence helps define potential new streams of income

Working with experienced data analytics professional will help you achieve all of the above.