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With companies ramping up their data strategies, a major chunk of small and medium businesses(SMBs) are implementing data analytics. Not only does this make the small businesses more productive, but also smarter.
Big data adoption has spiked from 17% to 42% in the span of the last 5 years for businesses of all sizes. This is why SMBs need to enhance their decision-making capabilities with data. Besides, the use of detailed insights can boost sales and allow companies to put all collected data to use.
All these tasks – and much more – can be implemented using data analytics.
What is Data Analytics?
As suggested by a recent Forbes research, 40% of businesses accept that they need to improve their data analytics strategies.
Simply put, data analytics is a broad term that can collectively be defined as the science of analyzing collected data and converting it into useful insights to conclude the information. This information can be utilized for optimizing processes, making product decisions, and increasing the overall efficiency of the business.
So how does your business take advantage of data today? First, let’s define a few terms in the data world.
Data Analytics vs. Big Data vs. Data Science
When speaking of data collection and drawing conclusions from it, people often tend to confuse between data analytics and big data. Although all these three fields are interrelated they are different.
Here are the quick differences.
The field of data analytics deals with data cleansing, preparation, and analysis. It is a combination of data visualization, SQL, and metrics development that allows data analysts to understand their data.
Big data refers to huge amounts of data that cannot be effectively processed via traditional methods. Data Analytics combines both Data Science and Big Data since it is all about examining the raw data and concluding useful information from them. This field revolves around applying mechanical or algorithmic processes on the data to derive information.
The next question is, where can you use this data?
3 Use Cases For Data Analytics
Let us discuss the top three benefits that data analytics brings us:
Potential Risk Identification:
In the field, you can also conduct fraud and security analytics through the collected data. This allows you to protect all intellectual, physical, and financial assets from misuse. Efficient data analytic capabilities deliver an optimum level of organization security and therefore, companies can identify potential risks as well as anticipate future activities.
Mainly, the use of statistical, big data, path, and networking methodologies is made for creating predictive fraud propensity models which lead to creating alert notifications. These notifications ensure a timely response triggered via threat detection processes in real-time.
Customer Retention:
The increased competitive pressure requires organizations to not only acquire new customers but also understand their needs and optimize customer experience and thus, develop a longstanding relationship with them. Research by TDS suggests that 62% of retail businesses have gained a competitive advantage via the use of data analytics!
With data analytics in use, companies can offer a seamless experience while providing relevant interactions and making personalized business offers – to ensure customer retention.
Organizations can capture multiple customer identifiers such as their email, number, ID, and address, etc. Since customers expect real-time, contextually relevant experiences, companies can deliver the same by collecting data via traditional as well as digital resources.
Optimizing Customer Experience:
Optimizing Customer Experience: Applying data analytics to design, control, and overall process of business operations in the production phase of services and goods, can optimize the overall flow. This ensures that customer expectations are fulfilled effectively, and operational excellence is achieved alongside.
With the advanced data analytics techniques, your company can also optimize the organizational workforce according to the customer’s needs and business demands. So, all in all, optimal data analytics can ensure continuous improvements in the results of the end-to-end product view.
10 Great Tips for How Small Businesses can use Data Analytics
When it comes to big data analytics, companies are missing out on important opportunities and advantages by using data.
Here are some great tips for how small businesses can use data analytics:
Running Experiments Regularly:
For creating optimal data analytics insights, it is important to run experiments via pilot studies and AB testing on the data since these methods can provide extraordinary value.
Using Bigger Datasets:
Before moving towards the insights part, it is important to understand that larger datasets bring more accurate insights. Not only are the easy to use, but they also present more accurate and targeted results. So when working on data analytics, make sure you enter bigger data samples.
Protecting Proprietary Sources:
Since the proprietary data sources hold great value, make sure that you carefully protect the assets. Now, this implies that your company would want to safely store and backup the data regularly – but that is not all! Protecting your proprietary data also means that you have to ensure that the data stays proprietary and any insights contained in the data stay internal.
Predetermining Specific Questions:
When working with big data, the most essential insight into business performance is obtained via pre-determining the specific information that is to be acquired by asking a series of data specific questions. Fake or irrelevant questions do not offer any clear answers. Therefore you need to predetermine the exact, relevant questions you wish to ask the audience.
Tracking Leads:
The most important thing to know is “where” your existing customers come from. Why? Well, once you know what made your product successful in the past, you can strategize future business accordingly. For doing so, it is essential to track the origins of your lead – like whether they came here from online reviews, email campaigns, company blogs, or social engagement. This data is useful for allocating more budget towards those channels.
Increasing Customer Insight:
Once you have gotten a better understanding of your targeted customers, it is important to design effective campaigns specifically according to their needs. By doing so, you can reduce the acquisition costs of customers. With the help of big data and data analytics, you can decide on how and when to target potential customers and what marketing content will work best for them.
Designing Marketing Campaigns:
The entire process of designing campaigns – set up, brainstorm, plan, and deliver – cannot only be exhausting but also be challenging. However, with post-campaign analysis (PCA), you can gain data and use analytics to generate useful insights on how to design more effective, user-targeted campaigns.
Innovating Products/Services:
Optimizing customer experience is above all so you have to focus on innovating products and services in a personalized manner to reach potential consumers.
Getting the right analytics tools:
To run a successful campaign, you require a marketing analytics dashboard. This can ease the daunting task of sorting your marketing data and converting it into useful insights. Using the right analytics tools such as Clicky, Church Analytics, KISSmetrics, Open Web Analytics, Clicktale, and CrazyEgg will help you in easily tracking down several leads, clicks, and calls achieved via online product marketing. Based on this data, you can design better marketing campaigns for future use.
Customizing your Strategy:
A business needs to set up a process to not only track but also maintain their data quality. In doing so, you also need to personalize your business strategy to achieve a specific goal. For doing so, you can consider several goal-focused questions before you finalize any KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Doing so will position your brand to targeted customers more efficiently.
5 Great Data Analytics Tools
When working with data analytics, tools are extremely important since the right analytics tools will help you in tracking down leads, clicks, and calls. Some of the best data analytics tools are as follows:
Clicky
Clicky Analytics (visit them at GetClicky.com), has been a success story since it was released as it became one of those tools that attracted users who had already been using Google Analytics.
The key factor that led so many users to migrate to Clicky was its ability to display information in real-time. If you get a massive traffic boost from visitors coming from external sources such as Reddit and other sites, tracking real-time traffic is essential. So if you’re more into tracking real-time data, Clicky is truly the best choice.
KISSmetrics
Many people visit the KISSmetrics blog to learn more about online marketing strategies. This blog is run by marketing guru Neil Patel, so we can say it for sure that their web analytics tool is worth looking at.
The numbers and analytics provided by KISSmetrics are better suited for e-commerce websites, compared to blogs. If you have a blog, you might want to use it alongside KISSinsights. But all in all, KISSmetrics is an easy choice to go with when it comes to e-commerce websites.
CrazyEgg
Did we just mention Neil Patel? Here’s another of his companies besides KISSmetrics. CrazyEgg is unique compared to the other tools that we have as it shows some amazing visual maps on how visitors are navigating your website:
- Heatmap: It shows the spots where people clicked on your site. You can use this to boost your conversation rate optimization.
- Scroll map: See how far your visitors scroll down and where they leave. You can use this to improve your website’s bounce rate.
- Confetti: Where did each click come from? Segment your clicks by referral sources, search terms, etc.
- Overlay: Simply report the number of clicks on every element of your webpages
There aren’t many visual reporting web analytic tools out there. CrazyEgg is one of them, so you’d want to go for it if visual reporting is your thing.
CloudFare
CloudFare might sound like an anomaly because of its primarily used for its Content Delivery Network and web security services. However, with those services come great sets of analytics that can be a valuable addition to any website. So, if you’re already using CloudFare, why not use its complementary web analytics. The site is currently in beta, and you can try it for free.
Conclusion
Nowadays, businesses can collect enormous amounts of data at every point of the customer’s journey and create useful insights. Using data analytics, in this era, companies can also drive positive outcomes for their customers and business while maintaining the highest level of protection. We have shared the top 10 great tips for how small businesses can use data analytics so do have a look and implement these to get better results.
If you would like to read more about data science, cloud computing and technology, check out the articles below!
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