The theme of this month’s blog may be obvious in that surely every business owner or manager knows the finer details behind their respective business. In some cases, data-crunching can be second nature and, dare I say it, a hobby, whereas for others it can be a consistent minefield to navigate, and often extremely time consuming.
This may tend to actually getting-to-grips with your business’ numbers a task that either gets put back and put back again, or even forgotten. But, it’s a major tool to master as knowing your data will help create evidence-based strategies, while understanding customers to better target marketing initiatives, and increase overall productivity.
We’re now going to explore the top five reasons why being data-savvy is important for your business, taking a look at insight, decision making, targeted campaigns, improving efficiency and pinpointing potential opportunities. Coffee, or choice of brew at the ready, let’s jump straight in.
Gain an Insight
In a nutshell, data analytics is the process of storing, organising, and analysing raw data to answer questions or gain important insights. Whether you run a bricks-and-mortar or online furniture or bed business, accessing your data from sales, top products, advertising source and brands to individual workforce insights, products just not shifting or weak marketing campaigns allows a business to really get into the nitty-gritty of data and formulate a well-oiled strategy that can adapt through regular insight inspection. Analysing your data across various metrics as outlined above will help companies identify trends and patterns and then customise products or services to meet these customer needs. By using quantitative data in in real-time, decision making becomes easier through regular insights.
Decision Making
This flows nicely to the next point, making data-led decisions that best enhance your business performance. This could be learning which products have been top performers, and those that are not, which customer demographic is responding to certain marketing campaigns, what needs improving and most importantly, how the sales are coming in. Data analytics also gives companies the power to make faster, better-informed business decisions, avoiding extra cost on ineffective strategies, inefficient operations, misguided marketing campaigns, or unproven concepts for new products and services.
Do you know your target?
With the data at your fingertips and some key initiatives to tackle, tweak or turn and run from, you’re ready to structure targeted campaigns – all backed up through your real-time data. Analysing customer trends, purchases, returns, marketing strategies, your sales team and more, you can break these down into customised campaigns to better target specific audiences rather than hope for the best with a ‘one fit suit all’ approach. Tailoring promotions to the correct audience will not only help boost sales conversions, but it will also drive down costs in marketing spend, meaning a much healthier return on investment.
Being Efficient
Alongside using data to maximise sales and performance, harnessing such knowledge can also help to improve operational efficiencies. By collecting large amounts of data, businesses can implement meaningful patterns to optimise their products and services, while streamlining processes to further maximise the bottom line. Data that highlights underperforming areas are also beneficial so you can either slam the brakes on or try and tweak what is not quite working into a winning formula.
An Ocean of Opportunities
As we’ve discussed, knowing your data can provide an ocean of opportunities for future progress and success. Insights from data analytics can allow businesses to update their existing products to reflect changing consumer demands, tweak marketing techniques, and optimise customer services. This is all plays into developing ongoing, consistent data-crunching to layout such opportunities to take advantage of. Your competition may be doing the same thing, so it’s a vital part of any business.
Time Conscious?
On paper it sounds fantastic, right? However, one common theme that pops up with data-deep-dives is time, and the lack of it for independent businesses. Fear not, RetailSystem’s RetailHub provides the ideal solution that not only delivers like-for-like statistics for any given date range, by salesperson, by advertising source, by category, by brand or by product, it’s all in one easy to use platform at the click of a button.
The RetailHub provides access to all the valuable data we’ve talked about and analyses it all across all areas of your furniture and bed business in one place, any time and on any device. Pretty smart, eh? RetailHub uses trailblazing technologies to provide valuable business insights, including management information, sales data and supplier fulfilment statistics. It’s all designed to help your decision-making process from accurate data, while reducing the time to pull such reports together.
So, how much do you actually know about your data?
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